Northeasterners: How many of you had hydroelectric downspouts this week?

[NNadir]

It rained like hell this week through most of the Northeast, which got me to thinking about all the energy in the rain, which is billions upon brazillions of tons of water raised to heights of several kilometers.

It occurs to me that if we captured all this energy the rainfall in the Northeast this week could provide all the electricity that the United States needs for 10 years.

Even if the average citizen put hydroelectric generators on their downspouts, they could sell electricity to the grid, and buy the power back at reduced rates completely eliminating the global warming phenomena.

Your corporate masters do not want you to know this, and so they've been supressing this simple system for many years. I think it's time we acted against them.

On a grander scale, I propose we install 10,000 giant funnels 3 km high and 50 km across in an area the size Maine and Vermont. This would provide all the electricity for the entire planet for the next 50 years. Such a system could be installed by 2075.

I will be building a ten watt system on my own downspout proving that this system can be easily scaled up to a 90,000,000,000 gigawatt system.

So much for global climate change. Problem solved. Go back to whatever it was you were doing.

[niallmac]

1. Whew!! I just KNEW that technology would come through. n/t

[buddysmellgood]

2. What if tissues could be made to capture the energy in sneezes?

[Massacure]

3. That would be a lot of water.

72.9 Quad BTU used by the U.S.
1055 joules per BTU

72,900,000,000,000,000 x 1055
4,009,500,000,000,000,000 joules = m * 9.8 * 3000
2615969387755102 kg = mass

multiply by 1000 to get grams.
2,615,969,387,755,102,000 = 2,615,969,387,755,102,000,000 cubic centimeters.

divide by 1,000,000 (the amount of cubic centimeters in a cubic meter)
2,615,969,387,755,102 meters^3

That is a cube about 136166m on each side, or 136.2km, or about 81.5 miles. A lot of water.

It's a good thing I don't need to drink all that water, cause I don't think there would be a toilet big enough to handle me after!!! :evilgrin:

edit: Damn, I used energy production from 1998, not consumption. Consumption was 98 quads.

[skids]

4. Funny.

I know it's a gag post. But for the record, the power contained in rain is pretty well measured by folks studying soil science as part of modeling erosion and dust-kickup, if you ever want to look it up. It's not particularly impressive.

And it's fairly easy to find that the kinetic energy is only good for 6-10 feet before the drops reach terminal velocity and waste the rest heating air on the way down.

By the way, we already do the funnel thing. They're called rivers and hydroelectric dams. They supply 21% of the electricty used in California. Not such a bad idea, after all.

As far as gutter generators -- well you might be able to get enough out of them to run a sump pump :-)

[NNadir]

5. Oh yeah, you're right about that funnel thing.

There used to be something called rivers. Fuck them. We don't need no stinking rivers.

We're going to fill them with silt and render them into power plants, changing the continental salt flows in the process.

I'm so cheery about this environmentally sustainable solution that I just want to go kiss the Glen Canyon Dam, a wonderful thing that helps illuminate the insipid face of Wayne Newton in Las Vegas and helped cover all those stupid colored rocks in Glen Canyon. You know like these rocks, photographed in 1962 just before they went under water:



http://www.glencanyon.org/index.php

I must admit, it's a great, great fucking idea. Let's do more of it. Salmon? Fish? We don't need no stinking fish. Ecosystems? We don't need no stinking ecosystems. We can get a whole 500 megawatts, at least when there's no drought, for the price of one shitty little canyon.

Why the fuck do you think the Grand Canyon is still there? There must be 1000 megawatts right there, all for the taking if only people would just wise up and embrace the renewable future. It's laziness, that's all, leaving that canyon empty. I mean the river's already dead anyway.

We need more fucking dams.

I cry tears of joy when I think of the great people's worker's socialist anti-capitalist three gorges cesspool - whoops I mean reservoir - in China. I am inspired to anti-corporate pangs of ecstasy by looking at the anti-imperialist pictures.

[DJ MEW]

10. I once wrote a research paper about the Colorado River

We have destoried that river and it actually threatens to be a major confrontation with Mexico in the future. There is a treaty with Mexico that guarentees a certian percentage of the river water to them and at a certian useable quality. (Salt/water in ppm)

The Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam resivors cause more water to evaporate in one year from the river then Mexico uses in that same year.

There are actually water pumps and desalination plants that pump ground water in to the river and reduce the salt content of the water to keep it at a quality level that is guarenteed to Mexico.

I can only imagine how much water lost from evaporation the 3 gorges damn in China will have.

All the research that I have quoted was from data that I got back in 2002 some of it might of changed since then.

[phantom power]

11. The GCI advocates draining the Glen Canyon Resrvoir, and just

using Hoover Resrvoir. They figure that water savings will be the argument that eventually works, if any.

[NNadir]

13. To be perfectly honest, if the Hoover was gone too, I wouldn't feel too

bad. That ain't gonna happen, but I wouldn't object. (Everybody in Southern California and in Las Vegas would object, but I wouldn't.)

One horrible, horrible dam for which a proposal for removal was made was the Hetch Hetchy, by James Watt, Reagan's Sec'y of the Interior of all people. (You remember him, the original government theocrat.) It was the only environmentally hopeful proposal of that entire administration.

Diane Feinstein went ballistic.

But I'm kidding myself. The west is already short of water, and it is the rivers that will be destroyed, not the cities.

The Free Rivers movement is at best quixotic.

[phantom power]

14. It's probably worse than that.

First we'll destroy the rivers in a desperate attempt to keep the southwestern cities going. Eventually, all our attempts will fail, and then our cities will be destroyed too.

One small consolation is that rivers actually appear to recover quickly, once they are free. Eventually this will happen, either because we choose to do it, or because the dams themselves will fail.

[jpak]

6. Yes!!! and if we could then harness "Hot Air"....

:evilgrin:

[meow mix]

8. plenty of hot air left for balloon-fuel. no more cars!

we can all fly off the hot air provided.

[phantom power]

7. I would be happy to conduct a feasibility study, for $100 million.

[NNadir]

9. You are always so modest in offering these studies.

We couldn't possibly accept to pay you less than 5 billion, ten billion if you find a way to involve Halliburton in this study.

Note that you are in no way required to actually produce anything useful. All you have to do is provide a good enough story to provide us lots and lots of opportunities to engage in denial about the effects of global climate change.

[Kolesar]

12. You could turn off the TV and go to bed at dark

Then you won't need any juice.