Archive for April, 2010
Lightening Power Station
Someone thinks they have had a great idea.
Why don’t we use lightening to feed into the grid and use it as a source of energy? I think I may have solved the worlds energy needs!
One pearl of wisdom on “Lightening Power Station”
Provide common sense...
Manufacturing Creativity
Heard on Radio4 this morning
An advertising executive was challenged about the fact that the UK economy was now dominated by the service industry and he said the following. ”We are really part of the manufacturing industries, we manufacture creativity.” Surely folk who say things like that should be shot, or at least pointed at and laughed at.
One pearl of wisdom on “Manufacturing Creativity”
-
Consultant G(oldfinch) Says:
April 27th, 2010 at 12:03 pmI am not sure we can advocate shooting people. They should certainly be given a reality check though and perhaps work in a true manufacturing industry for a while. They should have their salary reduced to the minumum wage - then we shall see how creative they really are.
Provide common sense...
Death by Greenhouse
From rural perthshire
I have a fairly large greenhouse and every so often a bird will fly into it, often stunning it, but sometimes killing it. People have suggested putting stickers on the windows but this is a large greenhouse and attempts with these to date just makes them fly into a different panel. Any suggestions?
2 lacklustre pieces of inspiration on “Death by Greenhouse”
-
April 27th, 2010 at 12:01 pm1/ more window stickers so almost every panel is covered
2/ tall plants inside the greenhouse
3/ hanging baskets inside or outside -
April 27th, 2010 at 12:01 pm4/ solid panel down middle of greenhouse so birds cannot see straight through it
April 28th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
What we are after is Watts! Lightening has a very very high voltage but a relatively low amperage. Multiply the two together and you get power (watts). Though it is not a small amount of power you will get it only exists for a very short time.
Lots of figures are out there but lets run with the following
1,000,000volts, 40,000amps and lasts for 1/10th of a second.
Volts times Amps gives us the Watts
Using the above we therefore have 40,000MW which is a lot but then we have the time factor which brings that down to a little over 1MW hours which is still a lot. But then when we put that strike into a house over a year it will only provide 126Wh for a year.
But then we have to take into account all the losses from the system. Energy from the strike lost to noise, light and inefficiencies in the system. Then how do we capture it? We would need to have spikes all along the grid waiting to collect it, rectify it to the grids phase and drop it in.
All in all it is a nice idea but not one that is practical.