Reply #74: I once saw a story on TV years ago where [View All]

[Jamastiene]

a family of four lived in a house with solar panels attached to batteries. On sunny days, they used whatever electricity they needed and whatever else was generated charged the batteries for night use. That was at least 10 years ago. There was no problem with line drop, because there was no great distance to be traveled between the roof of their house and the shed where the batteries were stored. A simple step up transformer and a step down transformer between the house and the shed would have solved that problem anyhow, if they had it.

I wish I could remember which show it was. I want to say it was either on Discovery Channel or PBS. I know that much because back when my family had 200 channels, I still only watched those two channels for the most part.

What kills me is that there is a dam about 100 yards from my house that isn't being used to produce electricity, because the mill it was originally built to power burned down and was never rebuilt way way back when. The one hydroelectric dam we do have in this county (that is in operation) produces just *almost* enough energy to power our entire county. It produces 22 Megawatts and according to Progress Energy, 1 Megawatt will power 730 homes. We have just over the 16060 homes (close to 18,800) in this county. Even if rural counties like mine made better use of what we have, county by county, in areas that do have the wherewithal to use hydro could go "off the grid" of the rest of the country and make our own power.

As far as powering larger cities, there are thousands of rooftops in large cities just sitting there doing nothing but collecting bird poop. The subways could be used to generate power as they move along the tracks. Sure, the bottom is used to go along the tracks, but the sides could be used to generate electricity by induction as they travel. Sure, turning them into a sort of perpetual motion machine is impossible, but they could generate some electricity to make up for what they use. Sure, some of these ideas sound crazy to most people, but what if just one of them turned out to be a good idea?

Until we do come up with a be all end all solution, we may just have to piece together a household by household solution where possible. Larger cities are the tricky part.