Comments on: The Weekly Carboholic: boosting energy efficiency is hard to do

By: johndoraemi

johndoraemi — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:58:56 +0000

Russia Makes Waves
Anatoly Chubais Wants Russia to Lead the World in Tidal power
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/specialsale/spotlight2006/articles_v6/waves.html

“If the new unit proves its worth, Russia will begin building giant-sized tidal power plants with capacities of 10,000 megawatts.”

By: Russ Wellen

Russ Wellen — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:23:03 +0000

As new as it is illuminating to me. Thanks again, Brian.

By: jeff

jeff — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:56:36 +0000

One thing I like about the Economist is that they’re subject to the “Economist Indicator” which is closely watched by the markets. Their cover page predicted the dollar going to zero, and the day it came out was the day the dollar made it’s bottom. The Economist has had several of these events over the years. For the record, I’m a 25 year subscriber to that magazine and love it.

Jeff

By: Lex

Lex — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:41:57 +0000

I’ve read about flywheel technology for this type of application before, but always as a “maybe” idea. It will be interesting to see how it works. The major drawback that i’ve read is having to encase them; if something goes wrong with something that big, spinning that fast, it tends to make a fairly large mess.

The Economist has been good lately on the subjects of food and the environment; one might figure it to be a liberal (er, well it is liberal…but Euro liberal which means conservative…) publication. About a month ago, “Buttonwood” suggested investing in a small parcel of arable land!

Thanks for bringing attention to that article and another great read.

By: Brian Angliss

Brian Angliss — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:43:10 +0000

Oops, my error. That should have been 16,000 times per minute, not per second. Sorry about that (I corrected it above and put a note that it was corrected).

Still, an interesting idea nonetheless. I have no idea how much mass they are, but the facility is supposed to be a 20 megawatt facility with 200 flywheels, so you should be able to back out the mass using basic equations.

By: jeff

jeff — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:34:43 +0000

What’s the mass of those flywheels? I’d like to do a “Back of the envelope” calculation of the physics of a 7′ flywheel spinning at 16,000 revolutions per SECOND. Wow, that’s
960,000 rpm….an absolutely anazing feat. I wonder what kind of gear setup they’d need to accomplish that many rpm..

Very interesting concept.

Jeff

By: www.buzzflash.net

www.buzzflash.net — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:25:03 +0000

The Weekly Carboholic: boosting energy efficiency is hard to do…

Energy efficiency is tricky. You might think that increasing energy efficiency would be a no-brainer, since it usually pays for itself, improves the reliability of electrical transmission systems, reduces the number of power plants that need to be buil…