Let the Games Begin!

Biggest nuclear company, France's Areva, slugs it out with India's biggest wind power company, Suzlon, for REpower.

 ---

Suzlon Energy in talks to acquire German firm REpower for $1.3b - India Times

"According to a Suzlon communiqué, a combination with REpower would be 'uniquely positioned to establish sustainable global market leadership in the wind industry with outstanding R&D capabilities and an integrated supply chain'. Suzlon said Hamburg would remain the headquarters of REpower, and that it plans to create 100-200 highly qualified R&D jobs in Germany. Areva, an investor in REpower since 2005, plans to use its network of utility customers to drive sales of wind turbines."

Let the Games Begin!

Biggest nuclear company, France's Areva, slugs it out with India's biggest wind power company, Suzlon, for REpower.

 ---

Suzlon Energy in talks to acquire German firm REpower for $1.3b - India Times

"According to a Suzlon communiqué, a combination with REpower would be 'uniquely positioned to establish sustainable global market leadership in the wind industry with outstanding R&D capabilities and an integrated supply chain'. Suzlon said Hamburg would remain the headquarters of REpower, and that it plans to create 100-200 highly qualified R&D jobs in Germany. Areva, an investor in REpower since 2005, plans to use its network of utility customers to drive sales of wind turbines."

Hopedance Book Review Done

Finished up my book review of "Nuclear Power is Not the Answer" by Helen Caldicott this weekend for the Hopedance magazine.  I really HATE being limited to 500 words max..  I can hardly get up a head of steam before coming to the end of the race.  So typically I end up with about 750 words and have to start the painful hacking and slashing bit while cursing that I'll never write another one of these things again, etc..  On the good side, I can post the shell of what remains in an entry here without completely blowing things up.

Hopedance Book Review Done

Finished up my book review of "Nuclear Power is Not the Answer" by Helen Caldicott this weekend for the Hopedance magazine.  I really HATE being limited to 500 words max..  I can hardly get up a head of steam before coming to the end of the race.  So typically I end up with about 750 words and have to start the painful hacking and slashing bit while cursing that I'll never write another one of these things again, etc..  On the good side, I can post the shell of what remains in an entry here without completely blowing things up.

Review: Nuclear Power is Not the Answer

Book Review

Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
Helen Caldicott, 2006
The New Press, $23.95

( Read the review... )

Review: Nuclear Power is Not the Answer

Book Review

Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
Helen Caldicott, 2006
The New Press, $23.95

( Read the review... )

New Book in the Hopper

Started in almost by accident on a book on hydrogen power and fuel cells I'd picked up some months ago.  It's called "Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet" by Peter Hoffmann (MIT Press).  Kind of an old book as I look more closely.  Original copyright in 2001. 

Since I just finished the latest Helen Caldicott book and it was still a frozen tundra scene outside, I decided to dive into this one today.  Got about a fifth of the way through so the intro and history sections are behind me.  What did I find out so far?

1. The best way to think about hydrogen is as a storage system; a type of battery if you will.
2. You can make hydrogen from steam by running it through a tube filled with hot iron filings.
3. In the 1970s, there were proposals to build mobile nukes to generate hydrogen for tanks and other battle ground needs.  Then someone figured out that they'd probably have to secure the nuke and that might be a bit of a problem to say the least.
4. An estimate of the uncollected environmental cost of fossil fuels was done for 1990.  The global estimate of externalized costs for that was $23 trillion or about $460 per capita.  If added to the price of gasoline in the USA, the increase would have been about an extra dollar a gallon for the local share.
5. Hermann Honnef wanted to generate hydrogen with his massive multi-rotor wind turbine designs. Perhaps that's a hydrogen storage tank in the top of the tower in the second image noted here. [Images 1, 2, 3, 4]
6. J.B.S. Haldane in the UK was evidently one of the first to suggest that using wind energy to generate hydrogen was a good idea.

DAEDALUS or Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
by J. B. S. Haldane

"Ultimately we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol.

If a windmill in one's back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy), our coalmines would be shut down to-morrow. Even to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of the wind into continuous electric power.

Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains.

At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses will be liquefied, and stored in vast vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably sunk in the ground."

New Book in the Hopper

Started in almost by accident on a book on hydrogen power and fuel cells I'd picked up some months ago.  It's called "Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet" by Peter Hoffmann (MIT Press).  Kind of an old book as I look more closely.  Original copyright in 2001. 

Since I just finished the latest Helen Caldicott book and it was still a frozen tundra scene outside, I decided to dive into this one today.  Got about a fifth of the way through so the intro and history sections are behind me.  What did I find out so far?

1. The best way to think about hydrogen is as a storage system; a type of battery if you will.
2. You can make hydrogen from steam by running it through a tube filled with hot iron filings.
3. In the 1970s, there were proposals to build mobile nukes to generate hydrogen for tanks and other battle ground needs.  Then someone figured out that they'd probably have to secure the nuke and that might be a bit of a problem to say the least.
4. An estimate of the uncollected environmental cost of fossil fuels was done for 1990.  The global estimate of externalized costs for that was $23 trillion or about $460 per capita.  If added to the price of gasoline in the USA, the increase would have been about an extra dollar a gallon for the local share.
5. Hermann Honnef wanted to generate hydrogen with his massive multi-rotor wind turbine designs. Perhaps that's a hydrogen storage tank in the top of the tower in the second image noted here. [Images 1, 2, 3, 4]
6. J.B.S. Haldane in the UK was evidently one of the first to suggest that using wind energy to generate hydrogen was a good idea.

DAEDALUS or Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
by J. B. S. Haldane

"Ultimately we shall have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol.

If a windmill in one's back garden could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its equivalent in energy), our coalmines would be shut down to-morrow. Even to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of the wind into continuous electric power.

Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains.

At suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses will be liquefied, and stored in vast vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably sunk in the ground."