Space Power

What if they "miss" when they beam-down the power and hit a school?

What if we get lucky and they hit Sacremento? :)

Wes

Focus, we need focus.

Well hell Wes, it will look just like Traverse City or Cleaveland then.

JC

Utterly stupid non-science non-engineering wanna-believe enviro foolishness. My contempt for the politicians and constituents that elected this. Are they gonna contract for perpetual motion machines next?

The solar constant is what it is. The slight flux advantage of being outside the atmosphere can't possibly make up for the costs of putting something in orbit, the impossibility of maintenance, the accelerated wear and tear up there, and the transduction costs. Hundreds of solar megawatts? That would take square kilometers of collectors. Humbug.

What don't we just make water run uphill, and then generate hydroelectric power? It would make more sense than this fiction.

Environmentalism: expensive, shoddy, deadly. [cf Uncle Al]

Rock music IS a mutation.

As predicted, you're only doing what can be accomplished from a seated position. When I lived in California there were frequently Mexicans calling at every place in the neighborhood, asking for work. There was also an old guy with a ladder roped to his car soliciting window washing work on new homes. It's obvious that you aren't nearly as ambitious as any of those people, or even the average paper boy.

Not that I believe for a moment that you really *want* a job, but your only hope of landing one is to knock on doors until you find someone who has very low standards and isn't put off by your appearance and demeanor.

That's particularly ridiculous. Any outfit that might otherwise hire a dead-ender like you won't be paying to read resumes on Monster, nitwit.

More likely going for another free doctor's visit.

There's no point pretending that you're doing anything productive. Here's the reality

Great plan. No sense wasting a perfectly good weekend on anything useful, eh gummy?

Wayne

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:22:32 GMT, the infamous Marv scrawled the following:

SOFT rock music is a mutation. RAP is an abomination.

In order to beam to Fresno it'll need to hover over Fresno in geosynchronous orbit.

If it does that, then when it's nighttime in Fresno it's also nighttime up there so it won't be producing any power.

'Soft rock' is 'wet drywall'.

They terminate the terminator?

He's done a pretty good job of self terminating. Ahnald was all proud to announce yesterday that he'd fitted his Hummer out with a hybrid drive system. LOL

JC

I doubt he even knows what 'hybrid' means, without a script or telepropmter.

Somebody already posted a link to an article on heat pumps...

Wayne

Yes, and the article said nothing about getting more energy out of the system than what went in.

He was talkig about an ICE which put out 110% of the power which was contained in the gasoline, due to fancy engineering.

ISTM that the engineering must be very fancy indeed.

Heat pumps can MOVE more energy than they use. The ratio is the coefficient of performance. As we know, nothing will get more than 100% power out of any fuel.

Heat pumps do move heat, effectively putting more BTU's in a space than contained in the fuel used to power the heat pump, under the right conditions. But that energy can't be efficiently stored or converted, only used to heat a space (or cool going the other way). The laws of thermodynamics are not violated, unless somebody can use the heat that was moved to drive a bigger engine than the heat pump originally employed. That's not going to happen.

It's not correct to say heat pumps are more than 100% efficient, the BTU's moved/BTU's consumed is described in terms of a coefficient of performance, which can be considerably more than 1. Unfortunately, the cost of the fuel to run the heat pump (usually electricity) is often a higher multiple compared to (for example) natural gas than the coefficient of performance, so the advantage is lost.

Do keep in mind that the energy used to move the heat from one side to another does not in itself provide heat(very little) Thus the efficiency factor is really a farce. The heat already exists from other none paid sources and is merely moved by the energy source you are paying the meter for.

One of the most efficient Air conditioners was fueled by natural gas and utilized an absorption unit. Very expensive to repair. Noe there are ways of converting that system for heat also.

Last I checked, HP refers to the output of an engine, and the Carnot cycle has nothing to do with the efficiency of the electrical side of a generator. The loss is in the production of the 1 HP, or in the larger sense, in the transformation of BTU input to mechanical/electrical output.