Tag Archives: Climate change

The Future of Power?

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The California PG&E outage is a clear note about what happens when you ignore your infrastructure and you don’t have a regular preventative maintenance schedule. PM can cost a lot, but as we see in California, does it really?

I started wondering about alternatives to high tension power lines in California. You couldn’t really bury any of it, with so many quakes, maybe. So what else? Microwave transmission? Maybe make it auto-aiming so if there is a quake and the tower moves a little, it can reacquire the source faster? Or perhaps spread out the generation stations, like solar reflector installations, to distribute the load and increase the production rate…

But then these ideas lead me to truly knackers ideas. If you are going to go this far, why not just also install immense Tesla coils and then outfit cars with wireless AC receivers and then the entire automobile fleet can be electric and not need charging, since you can skip batteries, it’s much easier and cheaper.

But if we did — then we might be able to use addressable frequencies per vehicle or overlay a data stream on top of the power itself, so a car that did a hit and run or is involved in an OJ chase could be remotely turned off. But man, with enough coils dotting the landscape, powered by solar reflector stations you could drive from coast to coast with ease. We could possibly make covered tunneled roadways and then increase the speed, then automate the entire thing so after you get past human reaction limits, your car can accelerate to a comfy cruising speed of 350mph or higher.

I want to trade an immense battery bank for honeycombed graphene and kevlar car bodies so I’m traveling safely even if I impact at ridiculously high speeds. Or I want a car that automatically fills with a gassy rubber filler and ejects the passenger compartment upon a catastrophic impact event, like we have with fighter jet ejection systems. And an adorable theme-able packed parachute, maybe Hello Kitty? 😉

But an entire truck fleet that is automated and powered by solar reflector stations and tesla coils. Zero emissions. Poof, just like that. I suppose I like solar reflectors more because they mean business. Plus you could put the parabolic mirrors on gantries say twenty feet up, and then have open pasture underneath for cows, chickens, and sheep. Or grow shade-happy crops?

These power stations might, if there are enough of them, raise the albedo of the local area and then you nip greenhouse effect at the beginning of the cycle. You’re channeling the incoming solar radiation elsewhere. It isn’t heating up water or pavement or farmland. It’s being soaked up by hungry devices like trucks and cars and trains.

I sort of wonder what an airplane with a wireless AC box would look like? Different jet technology, based on electrics not on jet fuel. And the tons of carbon saved. You could replace the jet fuel with new safety equipment, like foam bursters and ejection systems in case of some sort of failure in the air. The plane just falls apart, the cabin fills with sticky goop, and it parachutes to earth safely.

We would be free of oil completely. It would rewrite the entire narrative.

Frozen Oranges

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I smile when I see reports of 36 degrees in Miami Florida. My pleasure is manifold, first hit is on the smug southerners who pridefully proclaim that “It never gets that cold here! Nyah Nyah!”, well, now it does. The second pleasure is for the snowbirds, you seriously thought you could outrun it?

The main pleasure comes in a kind of satisfaction regarding climate change. Sure, global warming is definitely a chapter title in this book we’re currently reading out of, but this is just a mild little precursor, a microscopic fluctuation, the prologue so to speak. As the climate changes, the weather patterns will change. Global warming is coming and it’s making some places warmer and other places colder. This year is an El Nino year, with the North American weather pattern being dictated by the blotch of warm Pacific Ocean water and I believe it to be the principal driving factor behind this years minty-fresh winter. Even with El Nino, you can’t easily dismiss a low-temperature record that was broken since 1927. It may be El Nino, but you can almost catch a whiff of something else out there, a little something extra riding on top of the natural variation. Only time will tell what global warming will do to the North American weather pattern. Maybe it will make everything stronger – hotter summers and colder winters, or maybe instead it will muck about with the seasons, Spring and Fall starting and stopping at different times.

On Facebook I mused that our planet is in a constant state of trying to find the perfect balance. I don’t see anything that disproves that idea. There is something deeply satisfying however in the notion that humanity, through it’s own shortsightedness and resistance to change forced our own planet to seek out a new balance, one that doesn’t have our desires in mind. A kind of species schadenfreude, and the joke is only now starting to unfold. True hilarity will take another hundred years to suss out, to quote a favorite movie, “This is all far from over…”