Important tech advancement

This has got to be the tech break thru of the decade! No doubt a challenging task to engineer, and here’s hoping that at some stage the world will be powered by this renewable asset - wind!

I guess it is April 1st

Hey that looks like giant anus!

You know what the article is real.That is the websight i frequent.You know what would be better is to convert ambient heat to electricity effeciently.

If this thing is bird friendly then it would be a much better option than the existing towers with spinning blades.

How many homes can this thing power, wind energy is notorious for requiring hundreds of acres of land to power as much as a small city.

The technology is 1000s of years old.

I would like nothing better then to believe this. When I think of the world my granddaughter and great grandson are inheriting I shudder. However, where is the generator. It’s one thing to spin a light blade but the drag of an actual generator is something else.

Also my understanding is the real game changer should come from the super colliders and physics. I’ve forgot the name of it but that one could almost put the coal and oil companies out of business overnight. And, that possibility could also get someone killed!

Fusion energy reactors, wich can create energy out of water, and a ridiculous shitload of it.

The sad truth is, a lot more people will die than we could possibly imagine. This requires not just a transition from one energy source to another, it implies that people change the way they think and that they will need to endure a shocking cultural and philosophical metamorphosis. We cannot grasp the magnitude of such drastic changes, since personally they are border-line Utopian.
I am curious to find out how these events will pan out, and although I am only 30 years old, I don’t think I will live long enough to witness a great evolution in our civilization. One can dream though…

It works, and scales well, however

I still believe

Solar photobioreactor->solar drying system and water distiller->solar gasifier->generator or fischer tropsch fuels
Is the answer

Poo and sunshine making diesal from c02

Sorry, BPR, bio-diesel isn’t going to fuel a future of personal automobiles. Your grandchildren will live in a world that will look somewhat Edwardian. Omnibuses, light rail trolleys in town, long distance freight and passengers by rail or ship… barge canals may even make a comeback. Most people will walk or ride a bicycle, with consequent high density cities and towns, and lots of villages scattered around the countryside to support non-industrial farming. Most of your grandkids are going to be peasants again.

This wind scoop looks interesting, but seems to be designed for low winds in a single prevailing direction. I’d hate to see that scoop in a hurricane. Still, there are a lot of places with low speed prevailing winds. Putting a turbine in a venturi tube is hardly a breakthrough, though.

When it comes to bicycles at least, the only way a future where thousands commute by bike in this part of the world is if they were electric bikes that can give a boost against the wind, the average annual wind speed here is over 10 MPH and that translates into many days a year where gusts approach 40-50 MPH (pushing the pedals manually against that is nearly impossible).

They will also need built-in baskets to carry goods, canopies to protect from rain, chains to be able to keep going in ice and snow, and a way to protect from lightning. An alternative to a two-wheeled electric bike would be a three wheeled electric recumbent bike (which might be able to do more actually).

Also, a number of months back, Honeywell industries unveiled a new turbine design for the home that uses rare-earth materials to turn the rim into the generator, the effect of that is that it can also operate in winds as low as 2 MPH and is small enough for one to place several on the corners of your home’s roof. Wind power’s future, I believe, may not be in using up all of the natural space outside the cities, but through the installation of much smaller turbines that utilize space within the city (parking lots and rooftops for example).

Thousands aren’t going to commute by bicycle, in Kansas or anywhere else. People will live near their work (mostly on farms) and walk in good weather or bad. The American suburbia or single family detached houses on 1/4 acre with the nearest shopping a ‘short drive’ away is on its way out. Most bikes will probably be re-purposed as push carts, with large pannier baskets on both sides to carry large amounts of produce from the fields back to a silo. If the paths get bad enough, we might even re-invent the large center wheel wheelbarrow, that the Chinese used successfully for millennia.

People working in town will probably live upstairs from their shop, or in boarding houses within a few blocks walk.

At least Kansas won’t be underwater…

You seem to have a serious belief that society is going to become completely de-industrialized.

Tell me then, are people no longer going to have electricity, running water, and gas heating, will the life expectancy of the average man go back down to 40 years or lower? Will diseases like tuberculosis become major killers again, are people going to have to endure hard labor to get a meager portion of food to eat, and do you say that man will be unable to do so much as produce a smooth pathway for people to travel on?

If this is your idea of the future, then I have one thing to say, you should prove that this is doable by going first (there are plenty of primitive villages in Africa and the tropics that you can move to that have not seen major advances to their way of life in thousands of years). Though if that seems overly tough, then you can just declare yourself Amish and move to one of their villages.

Kalinaki I recently read Germany has a ambitious program to be green, or a certain percentage green, by a given date. However, this doesn’t come free and Germany now has the highest electric rates in Europe I believe. And, I had to wonder if the poorest of your citizens were faced with the same increase as the more affluent citizens.

Actually, I would like to hear your views on this. Since I know of no other country that has made this commitment. Here in America it seems we have a shadow government being run essentially by the oil interest. And, there is nothing the average citizen can do about it given some recent court decisions.

global warming is fraud and scam.

Lucky we have trees and sea to assist with carbon dioxide absorbtion…

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Not completely de-industrialized. We will still have electricity, but it won’t be used for things like heating water, cooking food or warming overly large houses. Electricity will run communications, lighting and other applications where other forms of energy just won’t work. Kansas farms had running water long before they had gas heating or electricity, by the way. And I’m pretty sure the Romans built some nice smooth pathways for people to travel on, and in some spots, they are still useful 2000 years later.

FYI, I have lived in both Africa and the tropics, both South Pacific and South American, and I am quite familiar with what you might consider ‘primitive’ living conditions. It is doable. Part of the population of the world is doing it right now. But the ‘first world’s’ industrialized megalopoli are based on cheap energy, and when energy is no longer cheap, people are going to adjust. One of the things that will be affected will be the cost of transportation, so people will live near where they work.

Another thing that will take a major hit is industrialized food production. With no artificial fertilizer, we’re going to have to go back to fairly labor intensive methods of working the soil. It is also doable, and is being done in some places. But it sure isn’t going to be corn or soybeans as far as the eye can see, as it is now. More like patches of woodlands growing fruits and nuts mixed with what would now look like no more than large garden plots. And lots of people with hand tools and baskets, cutting and pruning and weeding and tilling and harvesting.

A lot of the stuff you put on your table now, as a matter of fact, is produced in just that fashion, unless it comes out of a box. Only it’s not produced in Kansas. It’s trucked in from one of those ‘primitive’ places you seem to look down on.

“global warming is fraud and scam” Yeah right just keep believing that BS!