Back to study

Over the last three months I’ve been working full time so I haven’t posted that often. In the next few weeks I am about to start a postgraduate course in Systems Engineering. I am looking forward to it. [The course was completed in 2011.]

Over the last few years I’ve started courses in creative writing, international relations and development studies but I’ve found the humanities and social science disciplines to be unsatisfactory. They seem to be intellectually ill-formed, in the way by analogy that perhaps classical physics was before the start of modern physics. They thought they had all the answers and knew it all. That is just the impression I formed during my studies. No doubt they would be able to back up all their assertions with reams of citations yet it just seems that they fluff around without any reasonable framework to work in. Maybe that’s just postmodernism. Anything goes; so, whatever… [Or perhaps along a more Machiavellian vein it could have been the result of a long term strategy to divide and conquer the intelligentsia.] But the people who study politics these days would not even RECOGNISE a liberal democracy or understand what conditions are required for a genuine liberal democracy. That is a concern. But I am not going to waste any more time on that.

I think that the way to go in the short to medium term is to work on those transverse horizontal axis wind turbines THAWTs to see if we could design and mass produce small to medium sized units. Hybrid electric cars will eventually be fitted with a plug-in option so there would have to be a corresponding system of wind turbines, electrical storage and distribution networks to at the minimum meet the additional energy needs that plug-in hybrids would introduce. PV cells could be an addition to this system but are too expensive to start off with. Transverse horizontal axis wind turbines would have advantages over the more usual HAWT wind turbines in that you could deploy many of them closer to the ground and closer to populated areas, even if their output may be less per unit. That’s what I would like to be working on anyway. But it isn’t all up to me.

In the long term I think that energy will have to be sourced from space based solar collector satellites and a major aspect of networked terrestrial energy systems will be the ability to transmit energy via satellite links and local networks to where it is needed, notwithstanding the current problem of losing energy by transmitting large amounts of it through an atmosphere. I also think that a major problem of the energy crisis could be solved by focusing on energy storage. Perhaps to start off with you could think of electrical energy storage systems as being similar to early digital computers. They could have short term storage in banks of capacitors similar to computer memory and long term storage chemically in batteries by analogy with storage on early computers on a hard disk or on magnetic tape. To start off with these electrical storage units will be large and bulky, and there may have to be suburb based substations to house these things in. These storage units will quantise electrical energy distribution and are about optimising for energy efficiency over the network as a whole, rather than dealing with energy efficiency at the endpoints as with the usual way that the term energy efficiency is understood. Widespead use of electrical storage systems will reduce the need for baseload power generation and would make large networks of small scale renewable energy sources a viable alternative, even if the individual renewable energy units supply energy intermittently. There may be other efficiency benefits, such as leveling out the network load over time, in bundling distinct packets of electrical energy for distribution and then using that energy at the destination over a longer time as needed, provided there is some system memory and planning involved. In a sense this approach is about making the demand side of electrical distribution intermittent, matched on the supply side with increasingly intermittent sources (and backup peak natural gas turbines to flood the system when needed) and having storage systems in the middle to match or offset the supply with the demand. You would have to count on a slight oversupply for such a system to be reliable, but that isn’t an argument against such a system – that surplus energy could be put to good public use.

Another point about network-level energy efficiency is that the changes are largely transparent for the endusers. People can still largely continue to use energy as they have done while the network gradually transforms to enable a larger proportion of energy from renewable sources, over time. Energy intensive industries are another story. Perhaps their production processes need to be refined, if possible, so they they can make better use of higher quality energy. And yes, that is probably quite some time off at the moment.

The current stage of energy generation and distribution could be compared to information technology in another way by analogy. Before computers went digital there were only a few expensive analog computers around, powered by rooms of values and there was a famous quote by one of the leading authorities of the day that the world would only ever need very few computers, perhaps a handfull in number. That might have even been a common attitude around that time. Our power stations and energy distribution networks today could be compared by analogy to computers before they went digital. We can only think that power distribution has to be continuous and that every light in every house has to be simultaneously linked to power stations in real time. With such an analog mindset the only possible option would appear to be baseload power stations, and the fuels that can power them. Many of the new ideas expressed in this blog may have been laughed at to start with but I think it won’t be too many years before many of these ideas will be considered basic common sense.

Wise and Foolish

From the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wise_and_foolish.jpg

Vessels and water