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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

gisterme - 11:36pm Jun 30, 2003 EST (# 12773 of 12775)

Fred,

"...I'll put up some cash for rights in the video of the First Typhoon to hit the multi-billion dollar floating array..."

I'd partner up with you on that, Fred. However, Charlton Heston may not be available to supervise the disaster... :-)

Looking at what I said before about locating large scale solar arrays in deserts makes me want to slap my forehead. We already have hundreds of square miles of south-facing rooftops in the US sunbelt that are located within feet of where the energy is needed and within feet of the existing electrical grid. We already have commercially available solar energy gathering systems that provide power for the homes they are installed on and feed excess power into the electrical grid for use by others. We even already have government subsidies that partially offset the cost of consumer purchase and installaion of such systems.

If the government really wanted to intervene and reduce the consumption of fossil fuel why couldn't they just further subsidize the existing technology? Right now "excess" energy developed from those installations just deducts from the owner's regular electric bill. What if the installation were free but without the deduction for excess production? The initial cost would be amortized over time by the excess energy generated while dramatically reducing the demands on existing centralized fossil-fuel burining powerplants.

Those kinds of solar systems are relatively expensive per kWh right now, but what if there were a really large scale demand for them? Producing identical widgets by the millions has been shown to be far less expensive than producing the same widegets by tens or hundreds. I'd expect the cost of the existing technology to come way down.

The closer to the point of use that electrical energy is generated, the greater the efficiency of delivery. The rooftop approach would solve the energy delivery problem by eliminating it. You can't solve a problem much more efficiently than that.

Unlike the other things we've been talking about there is also no real technological breakthrough necessary to make that work. And as somebody posted recently, governments have already commited to having millions of homes put to exactly this purpose. All governments would have to do to assure availability of nearly unlimited renewable energy is make a more serious commitment to what they're already doing.

Sure, we'd still need the centralized power plants and the electrical grid. That's because the sun doesn't always shine and because large scale centralized stroage of electrical energy isn't very practical. However, a system of many distributed small storage points is practical. On existing sysems, at the location of the array, there is always some battery storage to level things out when clouds are passing over and at night. Most such systems can store enough energy to run a house for a couple of days even if the sun doesn't shine. The nice thing about having an electrical grid and each home putting excess power back into the grid is that via the grid those excesses may be able to get to places where the sun is not shining and there is a need.

The other thing that comes to mind is that using existing rooftops to support a distributed array would minimize impact to the environment. That's because adding a solar array to the roof of a house will add little if any to the environmental impact that the presence of the house already makes.

rshow55 - 11:52pm Jun 30, 2003 EST (# 12774 of 12775)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

"nearly unlimited renewable energy"

You can only get so much energy per unit area.

In solar energy calculations, they use a unit of energy -

1 "sun" = 1 kw/square meter

That's very close to the intensity of light, at earth's distance from the sun - from space. Efficiencies are much less than one - and location and cloud cover also reduce the radiation available.

- - -

Solar panels work - have for years - and with effort to bring costs way down would work better. Lchic has great references to fine work by Martin Green here http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7726f/1221

That work advances the cause of economic use of solar panels - on houses, on the sea, or anywhere else. .

Large scale substitution of solar for petroleum resources is likely to take large scale installations, as well - and there's a great deal of area, at maximum solar intensity on the equatorial oceans.

Gisterme's comment

"...I'll put up some cash for rights in the video of the First Typhoon to hit the multi-billion dollar floating array..."

I'd partner up with you on that, Fred. However, Charlton Heston may not be available to supervise the disaster... :-)

For the cost of a good movie - you might get a good movie about large scale solar energy "taking a piece" of the oil industry and do all the basic engineering that the job would take. Might be good salesmanship, too.

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