Yup…just one other reason for individual solar…instead of having a solar electric company…But the power companies HATE the idea.
I wonder how much land we’re going to want to dedicate to them.
I humbly suggest converting land used to grow ethanol corn to solar plants 
what about trash burning power plants? That’s one readily renewable and abundant energy source
“what about trash burning power plants?”
There’s one in downtown Baltimore that provides steam for electricity and heating for a lot of the business district. It burns up to 2250 tons of trash each day, and has done so since 1985. There are also newer waste to energy plants in Montgomery County, MD and Harford County, MD. All make a profit and cut way down on the need for land fills.
That was one of the things I was talking about with a couple guys at work today, as well as the recycling issues we talked about here in a different post I believe(talking about reusing more than recycling, etc).
Everyone talks about reducing our future waste and such, but none seem to want to talk about our CURRENT waste. If we built a trash power plant near land fills, and maybe involved chain gangs from the local prisons to sort trough it all, then we’d be set to start a new plant up. With the mindset of reducing our future trash, we could probably get more people into separating their trash for these plants
I’d sure think that burning waste would be a quicker/more efficient way to make energy than going through all those steps to try and make cellulosic ethanol.
“I’d sure think that burning waste would be a quicker/more efficient way to make energy than going through all those steps to try and make cellulosic ethanol.”
Yeah, but garbage and ethanol serve the same markets.
Whatever happened to Geothermal?
We live on a molten rock - been that way for 4 billion years?
Could we ever use up our energy source beneath our feet?
‘We have the technology - We can rebuild him’ (us)?
Talk about Green?
Just wondering.
Bcudamatt
They’re doing geothermal in CA (read all about it here: http://www.geysers.com/ ). But you need a specific combination of shallow heat and fractured rock that can be used to generate the steam. Not real common.
Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana is installing a $66 milllion geothermal system that will heat and cool a large residential campus that serves 20,000 graduate and undergraduate students. It is the largest geothermal system in the country and is scheduled to go on line this year. It will replace coal and gas fired boilers and a large cooling tower that currently air conditions the campus. It will be interesting to see how well it works.
That’s a different type of geothermal, using the normal underground heat - my sister’s done something similar for her home near Dayton, Ohio. But the CA installation is much larger, relates to steam-powered electrical generation.
“Whatever happened to Geothermal?”
You could probably heat and cool your house with a geothermal heat pump. But power generation would require steam generation, and wells about one mile deep would be needed to get water hot enough to vaporize and keep it as steam until it gets near the surface to spin a turbine. And this doesn’t address other issues in drilling deep wells. I imagine it could be done, but it would cost too much at this time.
The wells would have to be even deeper. At 5000 feet the temperature is only 130F or so. And 10,000+ ft wells are VERY expensive.
Underground water is about 55F. Heat is extracted from the water in the winter using heat pumps and in the summer the heat is pumped back into the water. Heat is available in substances down to 0 degrees Kelvin. Extracting the heat is difficult. I have an air to air heat pump that is efficient down to about 40 F. At this point, the heat pump goes off and a gas furnace takes over. I do save money on moderately cool days where heat is needed. The geothermal systems in houses in my area that extract heat from the water in the winter and return it in the summer offer a real savings. However, energy is involved in the heat pumps.
I saw a source that said the temperature rises about 25C for each kilometer in depth. I am aware that if you get about 5 meters underground, the temperature is about 13C, as Tridaq says. That would go along with your suggestion that 10,000 feet or more would be needed, texases.