Letter to President for Wireless Electricity


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Even if the President wanted 'free' limitless Energy, the Power companies are going to stand in the way.

Many sustainable methods of Energy generation are being suppressed now. ;)

tinfoil hat included with that assumption?
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^ Not an assumption. ;) Seek and ye shall find plenty of scams and hoaxes to fool the gullible.

Fixed

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There are other forms of nuclear power which are much safer, such as Thorium-based, or more significant would be nuclear fusion. There's huge potential but the technology isn't there yet.

Not just that, but one of the newer ideas is to use many smaller thorium based reactors in various locations instead of single large reactors that would power very large areas. The advantage to this is that, in a worst case condition, it'll have a significantly smaller affected area.

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Nuclear power is the future, uranium and plutonium is always degrading (albeit much more slowly when less pure as it is in the ground) so why not help speed it up and get electricity from it?

Also lol at the 90% efficient power lines, they're not 90% efficient and they're an incredibly daft idea. In the UK we have the 'national grid', ergo, power lines that go up and down the whole country, so let's just assume that at 25?C they have a resistance of 10? per metre... Travelling 50 miles (which is about 80,400 metres) means the resistance in the wire is 80400*10 = 804000?, or, 804K?. A very high waste, now I don't know what the actual resistance of a metre of electrical cable actually is but I'd imagine it's more than 10?/m.

Want to make energy more efficient? Either split up into much smaller grids with more, local power plants, or find a material that's superconducting at 25?C

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The problem with nuclear power is that we have seen over and over and over again that it always ends badly. It's not safe, and is too risky at this point to try to put into mass production. We need to try very small scale and build up from there.

Making use of wind, solar, and tidal power is far safer and friendlier to the planet. If we spent more money investigating green tech then we could improve the efficiency. The problem is corporations and governments are fairly afraid of changing the status quo as regards energy. They've gotten used to the method now and built entire industries around it. No one wants to **** off the big companies that handle energy.

I disagree that renewables are as friendly for the planet as people believe. Wind turbines cause avian deaths and are extremely annoying to humans and wildlife due to the constant drone. Tidal power, if you want it to have any contribution, will affect a large number of shipping lanes and marine life. And do we really want to cover our entire planet's surface in solar panels? That's what you'd need to do to extract enough energy from them. Geothermal, while theoretically there is more than enough heat energy in the Earth, is very hard to access. There's only limited places on the planet that are suitable for placing a geothermal plant and actually drilling down to reach the heat.

Personally, I think the future is in microgrid systems. Individual building complexes will have their own mix of small scale solar and wind generation, which will be supplemented by larger base load generating stations. There is no doubt these base load stations will be nuclear. Renewables just can't supply enough power, and fossil fuels will run out one day.

Also lol at the 90% efficient power lines, they're not 90% efficient and they're an incredibly daft idea. In the UK we have the 'national grid', ergo, power lines that go up and down the whole country, so let's just assume that at 25?C they have a resistance of 10? per metre... Travelling 50 miles (which is about 80,400 metres) means the resistance in the wire is 80400*10 = 804000?, or, 804K?. A very high waste, now I don't know what the actual resistance of a metre of electrical cable actually is but I'd imagine it's more than 10?/m.

The resistance of high voltage transmission lines is actually something more like 0.3 ohms per kilometer. So, lets do some math. Say the transmission voltage level is 220kV, the resistance of the line is 0.3ohms/km, and we are transmitting over 100km to a 10MW load at the end. First we need to know the line current. P = VI, so I = P/V. We know the power draw at the end of the line is 10MW, so I = (10*10^6)/220000 = 45.45A

The power loss due to line resistance is equal to the current-squared times the resistance.

Ploss = 45.45^2*(0.3*100) = 0.06MW

The total power supplied to the system is equal to the output power plus the power lost due to line resistance. Therefore the total power is 10.06MW. The efficiency of the system is simply the output power divided by the input power, or 10/10.06 = 99.4%

It's a bit more complicated than that because you have a bunch of other energy losses such as coronal discharge, substation transformer losses, etc. The resistive losses also increase when you step down to the lower voltage levels for suburban distribution. But overall the entire transmission network is very efficient. According to Wikipedia the transmission losses in the USA are around 7%.

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Tell us about that safe nuclear waste, that nobody wants stored in their back yard. ;)

Well they seal nuclear waste in concrete "tombs" and then bury it. There's a lot of room on this earth, so it's not really a problem. It's not going to end up in somebody's back yard, haha. And nuclear doesn't produce as much waste as you'd come to believe.

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Sorry to squash your dream, but renewable energy is nowhere near feasible for base load power generation. I just graduated from an electrical engineering degree and one of my final project was to look at the feasiblity of powering the university campus with renewable sources. We struggled to meet just 20% of the campus energy demand using commercially available renewable products without spending millions of dollars (and that's just for one installation, can you imagine the capital costs to power the entire nation!)

The largest problem with renewables is that they are too intermittent (solar only works during the day, wind only works when it's considerably windy, tidal requires your station be located near the coast, etc). This requires extremely complex control systems to regulate all the different distributed generation points, as well as highly efficient storage mediums (which don't really exist). Another problem with renewables is with the protection schemes used in the distribution networks. Short answer, the transmission and distribution network would need to be completely overhauled.

Also, the current wired transmission network is over 90% efficient. The efficiency gains you'd get from moving to a wireless, all-renewable system isn't worth the capital costs to implement said system. It'd take decades before you ever came remotely close to paying it off.

The only feasible solution to meet our increasing energy demand is nuclear power. Check out the National Ignition Facility.

http://en.wikipedia....nition_Facility

Myths Debunked... (Check #4 Page 3) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

I disagree that renewables are as friendly for the planet as people believe. Wind turbines cause avian deaths and are extremely annoying to humans and wildlife due to the constant drone. Tidal power, if you want it to have any contribution, will affect a large number of shipping lanes and marine life. And do we really want to cover our entire planet's surface in solar panels? That's what you'd need to do to extract enough energy from them. Geothermal, while theoretically there is more than enough heat energy in the Earth, is very hard to access. There's only limited places on the planet that are suitable for placing a geothermal plant and actually drilling down to reach the heat.

Personally, I think the future is in microgrid systems. Individual building complexes will have their own mix of small scale solar and wind generation, which will be supplemented by larger base load generating stations. There is no doubt these base load stations will be nuclear. Renewables just can't supply enough power, and fossil fuels will run out one day.

The resistance of high voltage transmission lines is actually something more like 0.3 ohms per kilometer. So, lets do some math. Say the transmission voltage level is 220kV, the resistance of the line is 0.3ohms/km, and we are transmitting over 100km to a 10MW load at the end. First we need to know the line current. P = VI, so I = P/V. We know the power draw at the end of the line is 10MW, so I = (10*10^6)/220000 = 45.45A

The power loss due to line resistance is equal to the current-squared times the resistance.

Ploss = 45.45^2*(0.3*100) = 0.06MW

The total power supplied to the system is equal to the output power plus the power lost due to line resistance. Therefore the total power is 10.06MW. The efficiency of the system is simply the output power divided by the input power, or 10/10.06 = 99.4%

It's a bit more complicated than that because you have a bunch of other energy losses such as coronal discharge, substation transformer losses, etc. The resistive losses also increase when you step down to the lower voltage levels for suburban distribution. But overall the entire transmission network is very efficient. According to Wikipedia the transmission losses in the USA are around 7%.

Myths Debunked... (Check Page 4) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

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Myths Debunked... (Check #4 Page 3) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

Myths Debunked... (Check Page 4) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

That didn't really debunk anything. It even says that in order to get a good amount of energy from solar, you would need an insanely huge solar array. We have plenty of space, so it realistically could be done, but it would be a pretty crazy project to pitch. And obviously it's weather dependent, so if it's cloudy for a week, then everybody is out power. So not really a good idea. Solar is good for adding a little bit of power onto the lines, but it's basically a bonus at best.

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That didn't really debunk anything. It even says that in order to get a good amount of energy from solar, you would need an insanely huge solar array. We have plenty of space, so it realistically could be done, but it would be a pretty crazy project to pitch. And obviously it's weather dependent, so if it's cloudy for a week, then everybody is out power. So not really a good idea. Solar is good for adding a little bit of power onto the lines, but it's basically a bonus at best.

Hybrid systems of Solar and Wind combined with a battery would be good idea. Batteries have had some improvements to retain power while weather doesn't permit new charges; but ambient light is still present even in cloudy conditions so thus small percent of voltage can be used to charge the batteries. Also Fuel powered generators as backups isn't a bad idea either, either way, reducing our dependance on fossil fuels by any degree would be good especially for the sake of dependency on foreign sources.

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Hybrid systems of Solar and Wind combined with a battery would be good idea. Batteries have had some improvements to retain power while weather doesn't permit new charges; but ambient light is still present even in cloudy conditions so thus small percent of voltage can be used to charge the batteries. Also Fuel powered generators as backups isn't a bad idea either, either way, reducing our dependance on fossil fuels by any degree would be good especially for the sake of dependency on foreign sources.

I definitely agree with that. :)

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This is just completely unfeasible. This sounds like something written by a gullible high school student who doesn't understand how things work in the real world.

If free wireless energy is so perfect, why don't you implement it yourself in your own home and let us know how it goes? Why would we even need a power grid, when everyone could have their own free energy plant at home? Why don't corporations implement these systems themselves and save their companies millions of dollars?

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Myths Debunked... (Check #4 Page 3) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

Myths Debunked... (Check Page 4) http://science.howst....htm#mkcpgn=fb6

5. Doesn't apply. I never advocated clean coal as a solution.

4. "The United States Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the solar energy resource in a 100-square-mile (259-square-kilometer) area of Nevada could supply the United States with all its electricity". Sorry, what? You want to take up 259 square kilometers of land for a bunch of solar panels? How many resources (silicon, copper, etc), not too mention how much money, would it cost to construct such a mammoth field of panels? And then, even if you do construct it, it only works for half the day. And even then, it has to be a bright shiny day without any clouds to get any real efficiency out of it.

3. My peer-reviewed journal article says otherwise. The same percentage of people that find wind turbine noise highly annoying at 35dB aren't annoyed by aircraft noise until it reaches 68dB. That is, people generally are annoyed by wind turbine noise when it is 11 times (every 3dB is perceived by the ear as twice as loud) quieter than air traffic. Also, they note that buildings cause more avian deaths than windfarms. This is true, but how many skyscrapers are there compared to large wind turbines at the moment? Let's see how that statistic changes when you start putting up millions of turbines scattered across the planet...

2. We're not talking about the government subsidising the small 1kW solar panel array on your roof. We're talking about implementing a nation-wide renewable energy grid. As I've mentioned the cost would be extreme. What will you do if its a cloudy day over half your solar farms, and a completely still day where your wind farms are located? What about at night time, when there is zero PV production and wind speeds are lower (so less wind power as well). You need to implement massive nationwide energy storage mediums to handle these down periods in a renewable system. Not to mention all the harmonic issues from the countless inverters spread across the nation that would need to be also dealt with. The cost is huge. There is no way a government like the USA, in its current debt situation, could pay for a project like this, and then subsidise it for consumers as well?!

1. This final point didn't even attempt to prove anything.

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This is just completely unfeasible. This sounds like something written by a gullible high school student who doesn't understand how things work in the real world.

If free wireless energy is so perfect, why don't you implement it yourself in your own home and let us know how it goes? Why would we even need a power grid, when everyone could have their own free energy plant at home? Why don't corporations implement these systems themselves and save their companies millions of dollars?

Think Logistics; elimination of cables and the distribution of energy in remote rural areas. Also think of electric cars powered by a grid system (Tron Type?) A new infrastructure would create new jobs and pump money into the economy. Our roadways and train tracks didn't always exist, think about the undertaking of those feats... The roads and railways cost money too, as do the power lines we put up and maintain now... these were endeavors proven to be fruitful. As for at home, I intended to do just that.

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5. Doesn't apply. I never advocated clean coal as a solution.

4. "The United States Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the solar energy resource in a 100-square-mile (259-square-kilometer) area of Nevada could supply the United States with all its electricity". Sorry, what? You want to take up 259 square kilometers of land for a bunch of solar panels? How many resources (silicon, copper, etc), not too mention how much money, would it cost to construct such a mammoth field of panels? And then, even if you do construct it, it only works for half the day. And even then, it has to be a bright shiny day without any clouds to get any real efficiency out of it.

3. My peer-reviewed journal article says otherwise. The same percentage of people that find wind turbine noise highly annoying at 35dB aren't annoyed by aircraft noise until it reaches 68dB. That is, people generally are annoyed by wind turbine noise when it is 11 times (every 3dB is perceived by the ear as twice as loud) quieter than air traffic. Also, they note that buildings cause more avian deaths than windfarms. This is true, but how many skyscrapers are there compared to large wind turbines at the moment? Let's see how that statistic changes when you start putting up millions of turbines scattered across the planet...

2. We're not talking about the government subsidising the small 1kW solar panel array on your roof. We're talking about implementing a nation-wide renewable energy grid. As I've mentioned the cost would be extreme. What will you do if its a cloudy day over half your solar farms, and a completely still day where your wind farms are located? What about at night time, when there is zero PV production and wind speeds are lower (so less wind power as well). You need to implement massive nationwide energy storage mediums to handle these down periods in a renewable system. Not to mention all the harmonic issues from the countless inverters spread across the nation that would need to be also dealt with. The cost is huge. There is no way a government like the USA, in its current debt situation, could pay for a project like this, and then subsidise it for consumers as well?!

1. This final point didn't even attempt to prove anything.

5. {Agreed}

4. Same costs that would go into further developing and maintaining power lines and telephone poles. Ambient light can still charge batteries in low light conditions. I'm proposing a smart system that would use a type of hybrid at power plants to adjust for the times of day and weather conditions. You take that same solar panel field the size of Nevada and break it apart into fractions and distributed it across the USA in select regions (create power Plants) and then distribute the energy with wireless technology. Replace one implementation of cost (existing system) for another (new system); also, think of the jobs that would be created that would pump money into the economy.

3. I personally don't find the Wind Turbines around this area noisy at all. Also there are more than one design or type of Wind Turbine (Imagine if Dyson got a hold of the designs or the guys who did the fan in the new MacBook Air's). There are a whole hell of a lot more buildings than Wind Turbines. You're missing the point, I'm proposing a select few renewable energy sources to power a wireless grid; i.e. concentration of solar and wind power in select areas to fuel power plants that then distribute energy in a blanket across the USA using a wireless grid system.

2. Think of the existing costs we undertake to implement the current wired system; all those cables and poles and transformers, etc. Think about the current costs to expand and maintain them. We in essences substitute one for another. Think of the new jobs it would create that would pump money into the economy. If anything this is the perfect time and condition to "Put people back to work." Hybrid system implementation; Again only at Power Plants; At night time use batteries and backup fuel generators and during the day a hybrid of solar and wind.

1. {Not Sure} but is Moot Point if isn't addressed.

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Think Logistics; elimination of cables and the distribution of energy in remote rural areas. Also think of electric cars powered by a grid system (Tron Type?) A new infrastructure would create new jobs and pump money into the economy. Our roadways and train tracks didn't always exist, think about the undertaking of those feats... The roads and railways cost money too, as do the power lines we put up and maintain now... these were endeavors proven to be fruitful. As for at home, I intended to do just that.

We already have a power distribution system, so comparing it to roadways/railroads doesn't make sense. Wireless power transmission is highly inefficient compared to wired. You're essentially throwing away energy. Where is the money coming from that you're "pumping money into the economy?

Why stop at cars powered by a grid system like Tron? We should be investing into Arc reactor technology, clearly Iron Man has shown us it is a clean and portable source of energy, we wouldn't even need a distribution system if everyone had their own Arc reactor. :rolleyes:

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We already have a power distribution system, so comparing it to roadways/railroads doesn't make sense. Wireless power transmission is highly inefficient compared to wired. You're essentially throwing away energy. Where is the money coming from that you're "pumping money into the economy?

Why stop at cars powered by a grid system like Tron? We should be investing into Arc reactor technology, clearly Iron Man has shown us it is a clean and portable source of energy, we wouldn't even need a distribution system if everyone had their own Arc reactor. :rolleyes:

The roadways/railways comment was meant to illustrate that all ideas and systems start somewhere that they faced nay sayers and uncertainties and cost predictions too; yet look at their success of those ideas. Every idea begins with a single step. Just because you say Wireless power transmission in inefficient, doesn't make it so; backup your statements with facts. Besides, even if it is inefficient think of the jobs created to research and "develop" it and make it more efficent; there is always room for improvement. I'm proposing capturing that energy that you say is being thrown away and utilizing it. Read about Micro and Macro Economics and how job creation plays a role.

Why stop at cars powered by wireless electricity, indeed! Think of all the utilities that could be powered wirelessly; Air Conditioners, Lights, Mobile phones and computers, Washer Dryers, Dish Washers, Refrigerators, Fans, Ovens/Stoves, Microwaves, Manufacture Robots, Machines, etc. Wireless Energy is Real (Google It.) and studied as far back as 1891, and look at WiTricity and others. As far as I know Arc reactor technology isn't real or matured enough.

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After reading everything i'm starting to like the Thorium idea if I'm honest, it's safer than other nuclear and produces less nuclear waste.

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We already have a power distribution system, so comparing it to roadways/railroads doesn't make sense.

What do you mean? We already had a way to travel across the country before railroads and roadways, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get there. So why build roads & railways when we can just get there on foot or by wagon? I mean who needs roads when we can make our own trails with wagon wheels?

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