electricity it makes us masters of our environments yet most of us take it for
granted deprived of it we get a sense of what life was like more than a hundred
and fifty years ago before power transformed our society and our lives in
the middle of the nineteenth century a day's work was just that labor that
necessarily took place during the sunlit hours work itself was back-breaking
manual mostly unaided by machinery the arrival of night meant retreat indoors
and the dangers associated with a pervasive darkness over the next century
and a half we took a world which had dominated us
and transformed it into this an electrified environment which responds
to our every need we control our climate process information and tend to our
health with power that blows hundreds of miles across an interconnected
transmission grid that encompasses the entire country electric currents the
flow of charged electrons intimately influences how we live yet most of us
understand little about how it works in 600 BC the Greeks first discovered that
static electricity could be generated by rubbing amber it wasn't until the 18th
century however that Benjamin Franklin theorized that electrical fluid might be
composed of particles by harnessing this flow of electrons or current inventors
and industrial it's more than a century later laid the foundation for what would
become the Colossus of electrical generation the modern power plant
it can be anything from a red-hot Mahima that once started consumes train loads
of coal without interruption for years or it might be a nuclear plant
incongruous Li perched at the edge of the shimmering Pacific Ocean a plant
that on its own produces 20% of Southern California's
energy or maybe it is simply built a house that generates more energy than it
consumes and returns that surplus to the electrical grid for public use a new
model for the future of power plants but whatever guys contemporary power
plants take the basics of their design and their integration into commercial
and domestic life for Ford's more than a hundred years ago in a conflict between
two giants of Industry and invention Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse
the outcome of the fierce competition between these two men would ultimately
dictate how electricity would be generated and transmitted but their
first battle would be waged over how to bring safer lights to the cities of
America early natural gas lighting systems and homes for example on
occasion were quite dangerous they had no shot off valve so if the if the lamp
went out the gas would continue to accumulate in a home and they had some
major explosions at homes in 1879 Thomas Edison invented the first commercially
practical incandescent lamp with a high-resistance filament that glow when
heated by a low current he soon followed this with designs for a complete
distribution system for light and power
on September 4th 1882 after delays and cost overruns Edison opened the first
electric utility the Pearl Street Station in the heart of Lower
Manhattan's financial district Edison knew that his product was going to be
expensive and would need to reach many customers the whole reason for Edison's
Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882 was to demonstrate that electric
technology could be used on a widespread basis not serving one customer like
steam engines and old factories but many many customers it is his choice of
direct current technology at Pearl Street
limited his power plants range the major disadvantage to direct current power and
power plants at the time was you could not transmit electric power very far
without losing a tremendous amount of the current so you needed a power plant
you know every half mile or mile throughout the city Edison's main
competitor George Westinghouse saw that electricity future was in long-distance
transmission Westinghouse put his company Westinghouse Electric to work at
perfecting a system using alternating current which flows in reversing waves
which propagate more easily and with less resistance in a transmission wire
beauty of alternating current is that you can generate that at a very high
voltage and then step it down essentially to any voltage that you need
so you could step it down to a very low voltage that somebody would need at a
house for their lighting or you could step it down to a somewhat higher
voltage that some business might need or some factory would need George
Westinghouse purchased several vital alternating current patents from Nikola
Tesla a serbian-born inventor Westinghouse recognized Tesla's genius
and brought the inventor to Pittsburgh to work for him
together they designed the components necessary to alternating currents
success in 1887 George Westinghouse invented a meter for alternating current
if he thought if you're going to make : a current commercially available you're
going to have to have some way of measuring what you're going to sell to
your customers Westinghouse is aggressive pursuit of alternating
current technology put him in direct conflict with Edison it was a battle of
business and technological giants Thomas Edison versus George Westinghouse this
is called the Battle of the currents and it was essential because the technology
that one would dominate the industry for the remainder of for the foreseeable
future with so much at stake it's not surprising that the Battle of the
currents took a bigger turn Edison went so far as to lobby New York state
officials to have his competitors product alternating current used to
execute condemned men it seems in prison I guess perhaps the lowest blows when
they were looking for a word to describe this today we say a person is
electrocuted but at the time they didn't have a term and Thomas Edison suggested
that they use the word Westinghouse that the condemned man was Westinghouse and
obviously it's very very upsetting to George Westinghouse Ludd Westinghouse
focused on the industrial competition at hand and left the courting of public
opinion to his adversary it was a great World's Fair coming up in 1893 in
Chicago and they asked for proposals to illuminate the fair to light it at night
realizing that nowhere in the world at a major event never been illuminated in
night before wasting else bid 500 dollars half of what Edison did and was
awarded the contract he took advantage of the opportunity to promote his
product so he installed a complete alternating current power plant that was
on display for everyone to see it had a giant Westinghouse alternating current
switchboard in the impressive part of that was that there was only one
Operator one Operator could control all the electrical equipment for the World's
Fair of 1893 67 million Americans and foreign visitors attended the Chicago
World's Fair of 1893 Tesla and Westinghouse made sure that they left
the fairgrounds with a good idea of who was winning the Battle of the currents
both George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla realized this was an opportunity
to really showcase the potential of alternating current one display they had
this used word power in at night there were electrical currents just you know
like little bolts of Lightning flashing all around us this illuminated word
after this dramatic success Westinghouse was prepared for his greatest challenge
competing head-to-head with Edison for the right to build the largest power
plant in the world
Niagara Falls for hundreds of years men had understood that the power of falling
water could be converted into mechanical energy the energy to run mills but by
the 1880s there was open debate over whether the ball should be harnessed
with his old technology or transformed into electricity and transmitted to
industry and individuals hungry for power if we look at Niagara Falls and
the for generating power it was obvious to a
lot of intelligent men at that period of time it was a tremendous amount of power
in the water coming down over Niagara Falls if it could be harnessed could do
great things for industry the International Niagara Commission
solicited plans from leading engineers to design a plant that could transmit
electricity to nearby Buffalo's manufacturing interests this was a
dramatic opportunity for George Westinghouse 'as alternating current
system ultimately the decision to choose alternating current which could be
pushed much further distances over transmission lines from the powerhouse
won the day for alternating current it took from 1892 to 1895 to build the
tunnel that would divert the force of the Niagara River to the plants turbines
during the summer of 1894 electric cranes ease the twenty-ninth under binds
the largest built to date into the wheel pits the turbines were essentially
windmill blades it could be driven by the force of niagra's water when the
plant was finished water flowed through the four bays and into the penstocks
vertical pipes about eight feet in diameter
before entering and driving the turbines which in turn spun rotors beneath the
generators inside the generator a magnet spun creating a magnetic field which
induced an electric charge in a casing of copper coils thus producing
electricity in 1896 the Niagara Power Station began
transmitting power 17 miles to Buffalo New York but it wasn't until 1901 at the
pan-american exposition on the Buffalo fairgrounds but the general public was
able to witness a large-scale display of the wonder of long-distance electrical
transmission in order to transmit electricity over this distance
transformers at the plant increased voltages to eleven thousand volts four
times the voltage of an 1891 plant that Westinghouse had built inside a
transformer an electric charge passes through one wire coil inducing a higher
or lower charge in another separate coil voltages multiplied at the ratio of the
number of turns in the primary coil to the number of turns in the secondary
coil what the Westinghouse engineers understood very clearly was that large
power plants which could produce large amounts of electricity which could serve
larger numbers of people over a wider area needed the use of transformers to
increase the pressure of electricity to be able to push it longer distances the
Niagara power plant provided not only a technical blueprint but also an economic
model that would be duplicated time and again over the coming century if you
build it they will come heavy industry in this case would
congregate around a reliable cheap energy source there was a fellow in
Pittsburgh named Hall who had an early process for the product of producing an
aluminum using electricity so they moved his company from Pittsburgh to Niagara
Falls when the fire became available that
company went on to change its name to the Aluminum Company of America and as
we know today it's the largest aluminum company in the world it soon became
clear as electricity flowed out of the Niagara power plant that alternating
currents was here to stay after Niagara even Edison abandoned DC
for AC technology I think it would be very fair to call
George Westinghouse the father of the modern power plant
he was the catalyst he was the person that had the the commitment for this
10-year period time to pull the resources to make alternating current
successful in the ensuing decades improvements in the electrical
engineering of turbines generators and transformers would lead men to dream of
a bigger and better source of water power this dream would culminate at
Hoover Dam 40 years after the first electricity flowed out of Niagara at 726
feet in height weighing in at 6 and 1/2 million tons and forming a 150 mile lake
Hoover represented a stunning increase in scale to Niagara and is still one of
the world's largest dams Hoover's transmission voltage of 287 thousand
volts speaks to the engineering leap that had taken place a number of people
compared Hoover Dam with the earlier Niagara Falls installation the
difference between the Niagara Falls of the early 1890s and the Hoover Dam in
the mid 1930s is the improvements in technology over that period of time
larger much more efficient generators and most importantly very high voltage
or high pressure transmission systems whereas people 17 miles away from
Niagara Falls could receive electricity in in the early 1890s by 1936 and 37
when power was coming out of Hoover Dam it was going over 250 miles to Southern
California in the decades between Niagara and Hoover privately owned power
companies flourished throughout the country
it did not take long for company owners to realize that consolidation was the
only way to profit in an industry that required so much investment to build
infrastructure
Tomiko had been the Attorney General of New Jersey his idea which was very novel
at the time was to basically draw a line between New York City and Philadelphia
and buy up all the municipal light and gas companies and traction companies
that existed between those two two major points and by doing so he was able to
generate the critical mass necessary to go out and begin to fund the tremendous
infrastructure that was going to be required to build the electric system it
was also a major step in the growth of the transmission grid more customers
meant greater revenue and expanding utility could afford the expense of
running transmission lines linking multiple plants into a regional grid
this system spawned the giant interstate power transmission grades that today
covered thousands of square miles improve transformer technology and
higher voltages meant electricity could be sent farther and farther by 1903 you
had over a hundred thousand volt technology which meant you could push
that electricity 150 miles or more by the early 1920s you had 220 and 230
thousand volt technology which meant literally anything within a range of
about 300 miles of the power plant could receive electricity the workhorse of
this grid is the transmission sub-station like this one outside Athens
Georgia where the job of increasing and decreasing voltages is done our network
grid system is based on about three main voltages and then we go to some lower
voltages for shorter routes but the network system is basically 500,000
volts 230,000 volts and 115,000 volts the 500,000 volts is basically like an
interstate system this o travels from state to state and there's about five
six main arteries across the state the 230 kV system sort of like the u.s.
highway system there's more routes but still not the largest number there's the
largest number of 115,000 which is more like a state highway system cache power
from town to town all over the smaller towns medium-sized
towns and to other areas to feed different loads transformers at the
substation alter the voltages so that electricity can be routed where it needs
to go we're standing in front of the 230 115 kV transformer the big box here the
transformer converts to 230 kV voltage down to 115,000 volts and then supplies
power to the hundred 15 bus which is then shipped out across the 115 kV grid
electricity flows along the 115 kilovolt power line and gets stepped down as it
nears its destination private homes this is a typical distribution
transformer serving a home distribution lines either twelve thousand twenty-five
thousand volts it's stepped down to 120 to 240 volts to feed the house for the
normal television lights appliances everyday use this kind of everyday use
has fueled the demand for power throughout the century as consumption
and desire for comfort have grown to meet society's runaway electrical needs
utilities built their bread-and-butter blanks next what each 36 thousand tons
of coal a day and never need to rest on two thousand acres in Barstow County
Georgia it's the second largest coal-fired plant in the United States
plant Bowen owned and operated by Georgia Power the facility produces in
15 seconds all the electricity a home will use in a year with the exception of
hydroelectric power and water Rick states most of the country's electricity
has been generated at coal-fired plants till today
coal was as plentiful as environmental concerns were scarce
investment flooded into utilities and coal plants grew bigger and more
efficient power plants went from small cottage industry to big massive power
plants they were taking this steam cycle and really bringing every ounce of
energy from it that they could and doing so in a very efficient way basically the
way you generate electricity you take water and the the simplest cycle is you
boil it and you create steam and you pressurize it with this amount of
heavier you're introducing into it and you put it through a turbine and the
turbine is a simple fan and as you introduce the high-pressure steam it
turns and it turns a generator but this simple steam cycle was wasteful it would
take about ten pounds of coal to produce the amount of energy that would take the
light a 100 watt light bulb for an hour that's the prayer significant amount of
coal today through technological changes we've been able to bring that down we're
now we're far under 1 pound of coal to produce the same amount of energy it
took a combination of disciplines to affect this kind of fuel efficiency
you had the power plant engineers refining that process increasing the
thermal efficiency finding out how to use fuels in a more efficient way
you had metallurgist working on piping that we're trying to bring temperatures
up higher you had boiler feed pump folks working on producing tremendous amounts
of pressure all this to supply energy to a growing population and industrial base
that demanded more power engineers call this demand low and this load changes
depending on the season and time of day load is the electrical demand on our
system if you turn a light bulb on that is putting a load on our system that's
putting a demand for the use of electricity the
use of power goes up dramatically during the day particularly today with air
conditioning so that you have very low levels of load at 8 o'clock in the
morning it goes up higher and higher in the morning period and then about 3
o'clock in the afternoon everybody's air conditioning is working
at its maximum industry is working hard and that's the maximum peak load to
service this energy cycle a utility needs three types of plans you have base
load which is 24 hour load and that's a plant that can run full-time you have
intermediate load which is a which is a plant that will cycle that will come on
in the morning and then at night it will shutdown and then you have peaking
facilities which run really for just a few hours today and you need three
different kinds of machines to cover those loads plant low is what we call a
base load our plant the economics of operating intercepts that is pretty well
runs a day in and day out 24 hours a day it takes for 9,000 tons rained loads of
low sulfur coal arriving from the screen Kentucky each day to supply the plant
the cold is pulverized to the consistency of talcum powder before
being blown into the boilers to be burned to heat water it's turned into
the steam steam that is has a temperature of a thousand degrees and a
pressure of three thousand five hundred pounds per square inch this steam is
delivered to turbine it turns a turbine the turbine is attached to a generator
generator the turbine spin at 3,600 rpm that generates electricity which we put
out on our transmission line once the steam has done its work in the turbine
it enters the condenser where it flows over 36,000 copper tubes containing
water from the nearby Ottawa River the river water absorbs heat condensing
the steam back into water so that it can be reused in the boiler hot river water
has been cooled in 400 foot high cooling towers each tower cooling three hundred
thousand gallons a minute not surprisingly it is no longer possible to
find communities who will welcome a plan to flowing scale with its looming
thousand foot high stacks as a result utilities like Georgia Power have
developed peaking facilities with much smaller footprints both in terms of land
use and environmental impact combustion turbine plants like plant Dulberg in
Northeast Georgia burn natural gas or fuel oil instead of coal in what is
essentially a souped-up jet engine the gas turbine engine uses hot air and not
steam to produce electricity fuel mixes with air is burned and the expanding
gases drive the turbine once the turbine spins the process is much the same as an
ax steam cycle plan the technology for this type of unit
with the combustion turbine is very similar to what you would see on a jet
engine the jet engine takes how the compressor brings air in compresses it
burns it and produces the power they use in trust this is a much larger machine
doing the same thing it's been equated to a jet engine on steroids plant
dahlberg's eight units combined produce about six hundred megawatts of energy
less than the output of a single unit at plant Bowen as a result the turbines are
only used to produce supplemental electricity when it is needed it's used
to provide energy to get you through the high demand period of the day today the
energy market and societal pressures were safer cleaner power have created a
demand for smaller plants that are more evenly distributed on the landscape this
is changing the shape of an industry whose motto had always been bigger is
better
built during the years that followed the depression those bigger plants produced
more power but in the 1930s and 40s rural farms had no way of tapping into
that power remote expensive to reach with transmission lines they simply were
not on the grid investor-owned utilities primarily did not want to go to the cost
of providing electricity to rural customers because you would face the
cost of building power lines in some cases a hundred miles long that would
only serve maybe four or five customers no return on your investment President
Roosevelt and the Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933
and the rural electrification administration in 1935 the agencies
shared the goal of bringing electricity to rural America where only 10% of farms
had power the TVA ostensibly began as a flood
control effort by the Army Corps of Engineers but it was quickly used as a
way to find new sources of hydroelectric generation on the rivers of the area
dams were built ultimately totaling 42 in the system and a massive
hydroelectric power project was launched which grew to a total capacity of 4
million kilowatts by the 1970s by this time the mission of the REA and the TVA
had been accomplished 98% of all farms in the United States and electric
service once the TVA had exhausted the
hydroelectric possibilities of the River Basin administrators turned their
attention to other forms of power in later years the TVA moved away from its
hydroelectric base and actually was a pioneer in the scale up of some of the
coal-fired boiler technology that we see today and became a die-hard proponent of
nuclear power in the 50s in this 1960s next the half-life of nuclear power how
a technology grew up and got old before its time in 1942 when Rico Fermi created
the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a lab hidden beneath the
football field at the University of Chicago
and in doing so launched the Atomic Age in an atom bomb a sufficient quantity of
weapons-grade plutonium is imploded by a TNT charge initiating a chain reaction
or fission explosion vision is is the process in which natural elements that
are that are on radioactive in nature like uranium is bombarded with neutrons
and then by barded with neutrons they split into other elements when they
split into other elements they release energy fortunately not all nuclear
reactions end in devastation it was the peacetime harnessing of
atomic energy that spawned the nuclear power industry the first privately
financed and commercial nuclear power plant that was built without government
help was the dresden one facility outside of chicago in 1959 see if you
think of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb and the ending of World War
two that the advancement in that technology over a 10 to 15 year period
was was pretty dramatic today more than 100 nuclear power plants are operating
in the United States supplying 20% of the country's energy needs
San Onofre is what we call a base load power plant which means it tries to
operate 24 hours a day 365 days a year at full power output which in the case
of each of these reactors is a little over 1,100 megawatts of power the suna
North Korea Nuclear Generating Station in California San Diego County supplies
energy for two and a half million homes and businesses
fuel is uranium uranium has the natural ability to fission which means that the
nucleus of the atom of uranium can literally tear itself apart when it does
that it releases a tiny amount of heat but what it also releases our additional
neutrons inside a pellet of uranium there would be billions and billions of
atoms so in very short order we can get a chain reaction going in the uranium so
when you have a billion atoms releasing a little bit of heat it becomes a large
amount of heat this heat is released inside the nuclear reactor which is
housed inside a containment dome the walls are four and a half feet thick
concrete steel and in theory would be able to survive any man-made or natural
disaster earthquake in this stress test the wall withstood a direct impact of an
f4 phantom jacket the reactor ended circulating system are filled with water
which submerges the fuel core we were to put a thermometer on the core the fuel
assembly itself it would be in excess of six hundred degrees as the water
circulated by that hot uranium the water gets hot it comes out the other side and
it goes into two very large devices called steam generators the steam drives
the mechanical turbine causes it to rotate at 1,800 revolutions per minute
that in turn turns an electric generator and electrons are forced through wires
making electricity to do power to run homes and businesses the rule of
turbines and the generator together weigh in at 800 tons for the equivalent
of 800 Volkswagen Beetles but despite this massive scale
it's still a fundamental process as radioactive water from the reactor flows
through the steam generators in a closed system it eats clean water in a second
closed system before it returns to the reactor the clean steam drives the
turbine and is then cooled by ocean water before returning to the steam
generator where it will again be turned into steam
behind me over here obviously is the Pacific Ocean and about 3200 feet
offshore we have a 16 foot in diameter pipe that's in the ocean and when we
turn on the pumps we draw in about 1.6 million gallons of water per minute the
pumps are run by 4,000 horsepower motors that's the equivalent of six NASCAR cars
running at full speed each pump is capable of draining an Olympic swimming
pool in 15 seconds if for any reason engineers needed to stop a nuclear
reaction they could do so by lowering an array of control rods into the core the
control rods absorb the atoms splitting neutrons that are driving the chain
reaction bringing it to a halt but the surprising aspect of this plant is that
to a great degree it ones without stopping it can run for two years
without needing new fuel at full output San Onofre unit number two has been
operating for about five hundred and thirty days consecutively but this was a
natural gas plant or an oil plant or coal plant we constantly be needing to
bring in trains or pipelines bringing in this fuel product
outside transformers step 22,000 volts of electricity up to 220 thousand volts
essentially pressurizing it for transmission throughout Southern
California although nuclear power is a relatively new and seemingly successful
technology it has yet to recover from an accident in Harrisburg Pennsylvania
the most significant event that it from a safety standpoint that has ever
happened in the u.s. nuclear power industry was the Three Mile Island
accident in 1979 this was literally a brand-new reactor with brand new
operators four o'clock in the morning because of a combination of human era
and mechanical design they allowed the reactors core the uranium could be
uncovered for several hours without any water to keep the uranium cool the
uranium overheated and actually melted evidence suggests that fallout from the
accident was low but the public relations setback was immense no new
plants have been built since however most nuclear power advocates predict
that the industry will stage a comeback in my opinion there will be a rebirth of
nuclear power it's not a question of if it's a question of lending and
proponents suggest the question of what kind of waste we want in our environment
may well be nuclear powers most convincing arguments nuclear power in
the United States supplies about 20 percent of the electricity in the whole
United States that would probably surprise most people that it's that high
in that 20 percent that of voids in a yearly basis the the emission of about a
hundred and seventy seven million metric tons of greenhouse gases that would be
emitted into the atmosphere if that 20 percent nuclear power was replaced say
with coal or oil I would say that in the next 10 to 20 years you will see the
percentage of nuclear power rising because that's a good way to address the
global warming issue and you do not have any
solid waste other than the radioactive waste that you have to deal with but I
feel like we'll figure out a way to manage that problem perhaps but the
3,000 tons of spent fuel that the industry produces each year has no
permanent home and is simply being held at the nuclear plants that produced it
since this waste will remain radioactive for thousands of years it's not
surprising that most elected officials continue to say not in my backyard next
electrical consumption grows as interest in conservation wanes how will power
plants of the future meet the demand although the history of power plants is
largely one of growth and technological triumph the future of electrical
generation could not be more uncertain what is clear is that we have come to a
crossroads where environmental concerns unchecked consumption and technological
limits meet the size of a power plant really has capped out at about a
thousand megawatts and I was thinking about why that's really the limit the
boiler and a coal facility right now is the size of an apartment building it's
11 stories high right now you've got turbine blades that
in some cases are 14 feet long and the tip speed of something 14 feet long
rotating at 3,600 rpm starts to get supersonic
today the country's electrical needs are supplied by regional interconnected
power grids that in theory ensure that power flows where and when it is needed
and practice these grids are straining to meet demand it's really a series of
regional grids at this point I mean you know theoretically you can move power
from Texas to California however there might only be one really good path to do
that but ideally you would want to have more options than that the lack of
options in routing electricity is further complicated by heavy demand and
summertime it is beginning to cause power shortages it's an issue of
generation it's an issue of not having enough kilowatt hours in the system and
it's occasioned by catastrophic failures at a facility or even small problems
that take it offline for several hours the flipside of insufficient power
generation is a countrywide lack of interest in energy conservation I see
probably less emphasis and care about energy efficiency today than I ever have
I can't even get you know people that I know and whatever to turn off their
lights when they don't don't use it right here in my office here I can't
switch off the light in my own office or in an individual room over a third of
the world's population doesn't have electricity today and there aren't
people looking to not have electricity so it's always more load more load
coming on globally well we got to ask ourselves as a society as creatures of
the earth how we're going to give that load and it isn't going to be burning
fossil fuels when you talk about the environmental implications of power
creation you first have to look at the the type of primary fuel I mean if
you're talking about oil are you dealing with NO x or nitrous oxides you're
dealing with metals that are in the oil and when you deal with coal of course
then you're dealing with particulate emissions in some cases trace elements
of heavy metals and you're dealing with particulate emissions which is almost
the dust that comes out of out of the call the immediate health
risks of heavy metals and particulate emissions pale in comparison to the
global implications of increased carbon dioxide in our atmosphere carbon dioxide
which is a direct result of burning fossil fuels concentrations of his
greenhouse gas have increased sharply in the upper atmosphere since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution warming our environment and threatening catastrophic
climate change in the face of a deteriorating environment we clearly
need to exploit a clean energy source but which one the Earth's core is much
hotter than the Earth's surface fortunately and the interaction of these
temperature gradients comes very close to the surface in many parts of the
world and that can be used to create a hot fluid or create scheme which then
drives conventional turbines at a geothermal plant wills are drilled
hundreds of feet below the earth's surface into reservoirs with
temperatures of 180 degrees Celsius or more although mother nature supplies the
heat geothermal sources like geysers are neither widespread nor are they clean
fraught with problems in terms of first if tough to locate there is none in the
Northeast and I'm aware so we have difficulty using it here with the
geothermal facility your primary pollutant is a hydrogen sulfide so the
problem there is taken the hydrogen sulphide out capturing it and then
finding some way to deal with that once you've captured it the most futuristic
of technologies fusion combines to light atomic nuclei to form a single heavier
nucleus this generates heat levels similar to the plasma state of the Sun
that's a cream for egomaniac scientists who figure that they can take the
absolute most cataclysmic forces to be known to man and manage them
there is however a less dramatic way to capture the energy of the Sun solar
power but the debate surrounding it is about efficiency not safety even in
areas of the country where the Sun shines a lot like in the desert
Southwest the technology is still very behind being able to supply the big base
load plants like coal or nuclear plants for an example to replace an average
nuclear plant would take about six hundred square miles of solar cells with
today's technology solar advocates say that it is not so much the technology
but the concept of massive centralized power plants that limit Soler's
effectiveness perhaps the power plant of the future looks something like this a
house on the Maine coast it generates more energy than it consumes this house
incorporates both solar thermal for space heating and hot water and solar
electricity for electrical production the panels are integrated to form the
finished weathering skin of the South roof and the house pretty much exists in
terms of its heating hot water and electrical energy requirements from the
harvested energy that falls on the roof the house does more than just exist it
contributes to the energy needs of its community and homeowner William Lord is
quite proud of this fact we make most of our own hot water and all of our
electricity in fact we generate more electricity than we actually use so the
process of fitting into the environment is seamless in our case and is not
disruptive solar power not only makes environmental sense but economic sense
as well we have two meters on the house one measure is the excess energy that we
export to the power company and the other meter measures what energy we take
from the Power Company and in Maine we have something called annualized net
metering and the bottom line is that we essentially pay no electric bill
annually when we build our solar house we didn't realize we were actually
creating an event we added to that event a place where
people come to learn about solar power we have many visitors here we added to
that event our website the main solar house gets more than 1
million hits a year this month I'm taking a look at a house in
Kennebunkport nearby the former President of the United States George
Bush has solar thermal panels on his roof I think that's a great hope for
everybody because clearly that is probably the best way to produce power
taking instant in solar solar energy doesn't pollute anything the direct
conversion of solar energy into electricity with photovoltaics is the
most environmentally benign method of making electricity and so that coupled
with other conversion measures such as wind energy conversion hydropower can
combine to gradually displace the conventional systems to build a
resilient energy economy based on renewables it's not a question of if but
when and from my perspective time is short we should be investing
they're relatively plentiful and relatively inexpensive reserves of
conventional energy to build this technology bridge to the future because
these are finite resources and they are not going to be here indefinitely
you
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