This reminds me of this Futurama clip:
Thats very true, I feel like this is something that will never make it off the drawing board into reality, if it did a lot of people I imagine would be angry. Its almost insulting that a project like this has even been proposed however!
CD has a good point, wind power does create a lot of visual pollution, and so does solar in a way, unless the panels can be spread out amongst houses (on roofs etc) in which case it would be a much better way to go.
That reminded me of a project that was just completed at my University, a team there developed a new type of oceanic generator that featured some kind of revolutionary joint between the big blocks of the generator, which produced a lot of energy.
Yes, thats the pollution left behind my Fission reactors, theres no such waste with Fusion reactors, altho they still do generate some nuclear waste, but it is much less and not every time the reactor operates, maybe every month or so. And even then, the waste does not take thousands of years to become safe again, its a matter of a decade for fusion waste products (mainly the walls of the reactor which become radioactive after being used for a long time, then need replacing)
Al_Capone has spoken! Im liking what I hear 
But what do you mean by ‘the reason there’s no work is because of fusion’?
Especially when we find a way to utilize cold fusion… but until then we are left with radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years.
And I beg to differ about visual pollution. You can adapt wind turbines as part of the landscape, and besides, they don’t produce any kind of waste at all. Along with solar energy, and the water-current based ones, it’s a pretty good clean energy source.
Well, the father of mad scientists, Nicola Tesla was trying to turn the iosphere (don’t really know if thats the spelling, aka one of the layers of the atmosphere) into a massive field of electricity thus giving everyone free electricity.
Anyway, $21b for 300,000 homes is just pointless, they should spend $21b making an army of giant mechanical hampsters to run around in hampster wheels to make electricity.
I wish they could find a way to turn human stupidity into power, we seem to have limitless resources of that in the world. Yes, nuclear fission bad, nuclear fusion good. That Japanese project reminds me of a couple of ambitious solar projects that were announced by the previous Australian government. They never happened. It’s called greenwashing, I believe.
Visual pollution is not a personal concern for me, but there is a lot of resistance from people who live in coastal areas when you want to build the ginormous wind turbines out in the water.
People mistakenly think of oil as an energy source. It is merely an energy storage medium, and for a long time has been relatively inexpensive and convenient due to its abundance. The hydrocarbons present in crude oil are a result of photosynthesis carried out by plants long ago. The vast majority of our energy comes from the Sun. There are however a few non-solar energy sources; geothermal, tidal, nuclear, etc…
Of course if they pull off a self-sustaining fusion reaction that has positive net energy, then that would probably eclipse the other sources, at least in energy density. There would be significant initial overhead and periodic tritium decontamination costs, but it could prove to be a great method for producing power.
Non-photovoltaic solar, wind, and wave power are at this time our best bets for clean sustainable energy. America has become accustomed to cheap energy due to the abundance of petroleum and coal. In the '70’s it was estimated that under the state of Ohio, there was sufficient coal to supply the world’s energy needs for 300+ years. Today, people are no longer comfortable with building coal power plants because of pollution. The lauded “clean coal” technology may one day allow us to tap that vast underground energy reservoir, but until that day, we’re stuck burning it.
Fortunately we will not keep going, burning oil until it’s all gone, because we will never run out of oil. Before you have a knee-jerk reaction to that statement thinking it to be political in nature, as I did when I first heard it, understand what a petrochemist friend of mine explained. Due to the market forces of supply and demand, as the remaining petroleum sources in the ground become increasingly more difficult to extract, tar sands and oil shale for example, the price of oil will begin to increase exponentially until it becomes unaffordable by the populace.
Either society will come to a screeching halt, or people at large will switch to an alternative to keep things going. Hopefully the push for alternatives today will ease that process and prevent the “brick wall” style transition we could have.
I reckon there has to be multiple power sources. For example, geothermal, solar thermal (much better than photovoltaics) and so on.
A key component could be a “smart grid” to make it easier to buy and sell electricity. Then, just watch the inventors come out of the woodwork…
“Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” - Frank Zappa
Yes Aquinex there must be a energy cost ceiling. And while there are indirect costs of living associated with fuel most people experience the energy cost at the bowser. If people could drive for pennies out of an outlet then CO2 wouldnt matter to them. Oil barrel prices just collapsed again and electric vehicles subsided in the public view. Its all bottom line near term thinking. The Japanese are renowned for medium long term planning what does that say about they’re investment?
There is still 85% solar energy falling untapped (by man for energy) on the earth, our current technology is in its infancy.
Use gravity/tidal forces, its just big dumb (expensive) engineering that the oil industry has exploited for decades. They solved oceanic industrial issues ages ago. Harness those oil rig building technologies for tidal energy and you have a winner, except for transmission. Lots of cable loss in a traditional land based grid, can’t imagine what you would need to do to get it back from the mid Atlantic or even near coast line?
Also the Japanese are renowned for medium to long term planning, what are they thinking with this strategic development?
Money is only spent developing alternative energy because their is money to made selling it to the masses. Nobody is trying to develop cheap energy for the benefit of people. Solar is a dead end in corporate minds bevause if an efficient solar panel is developed then people could buy some and run their houses with them and not need to buy power from anybody. Sunlight is free and that is the problem.
I read about Tesla’s plan and it sounds great except for the fact that it provides FREE energy. Which is why the theory never got developed.
Until someone decides to develop energy for the benefit of mankind instead of using energy for the sake of greed, then there will never really be a solution.
I think one of the things we also need to work on is to lower our overall consumption of energy. If we were to use less electricity, the transition to infant technologies would not be quite so futile. Currently the grid has to be prepared to supply the people under maximum demand, and during times of disuse all the energy is going to waste. Researchers are developing theories for smart grids, ones in which people’s homes store excess electricity for their own needs and supply it back to the grid in times of high demand. I think this is definitely something we should look into.
Abomi-wait for it - nation!
andrew-101 An updated version of that Tesla experiment should be the way to go,
imagine the amount of energy that could be generated if you placed floating versions
of those out in the middle of the ocean!
I imagine it as a giant floating metal bare leaveless tree,
bobbing around with hundreds of copper rods to coax the electricity
out of this very dangerous area of sea! 
I think the billionare who wanted to start the texas wind field only needed another
2 billion to finish his project.
That microwave one looks like some kind of a covert death ray experiment
I have a time travel video with an evil future society, and I’ve been meaning to work that in with a caption:
“Microwaves are a naturally occurring phenomena”
To add a bit of eerieness, like all the microwaves we get are a malevolent plan from a future society.
The only reference I had before was a military truck with a microwave dish attached to the roof,
but this microwave satelite is way better.
Why not just launch all that waste into space and let it free fall into the sun?
actually… I was watching this thing on nasa a month ago about setting up a base on the moon. They are designing machines that make and lay out solar panels on the moon, that would gather energy, then be shipped to a giant beam similiar to the one the chinese are making, then it would beam back to earth. It would also be a harmless ray, planes can fly through it.
There is actually a way to beam electricity without zapping everything in it’s path. It’s called evanescent coupling. Anyway.
Originally Posted by freen I reckon there has to be multiple power sources. For example, geothermal, solar thermal (much better than photovoltaics) and so on.
A key component could be a “smart grid” to make it easier to buy and sell electricity. Then, just watch the inventors come out of the woodwork…
Quote: Originally Posted by <b>fatfinger</b> [](http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1472585#post1472585) <i>I wish they could find a way to turn human stupidity into power, we seem to have limitless resources of that in the world.</i>“Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” - Frank Zappa
Hee hee. I like Einstein’s quote “I believe there are only two limitless things; the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not quite sure about the first one.”
Yeah, I’m with you on the multiple power sources idea. I also think we need to get away from the style of “mainframe” energy production, to a more distributed model. Couple that with a smart grid, and the possibility for entrepreneurs of small and medium size to enter the electricity production racket might be enhanced.
@Andycircus: I believe that picture you describe as a “microwave satellite”, is actually called an active denial system. so, yeah, it sorta is a covert death ray thing, seeing as how it can give groups of people the feeling of being burnt like a light globe, all over their body, from about a mile away. If you look closer, you’ll notice that it’s a flat panel, as opposed to a satellite dish.
http://defense-update.com/products/a/ads.htm
Yeah I noticed the flat plate for the top, the other photos I saw,
on the first goggle search page for ‘military microwave’ looked like
a doctored photo representing the microwave dish,
unless it’s just really pixelated.
I saw a reporter get hit with one of these rays for a second,
I think it was a lesser powered version for crowd control, but he said it was unbearable.
I doctored up a photo to represent a possible scenario for this new microwave/electricity death ray
Al_Capone has spoken! Im liking what I hear
But what do you mean by ‘the reason there’s no work is because of fusion’?
Which means everything had become static, intertwine. I don’t see much different between the world and the universe. Enable to create jobs, the water has to be move to where it’s needed while not taking away too much that is relied upon.
During the global rape I had a vision. Say you give everyone there own key within a grid, depending on how many are connected to one another will determine the amount and the speed in which things are moved. But every door that is open must go through a central grid which in return will apply balance to each door that is open. This assures that change will not happen too quickly where change is not needed and those that wish to change will become satisfy with the outcome, not just jobs but rules as well.
The satisfactory will be done by statics in which people had enter.
Well I be jammed, tarred, feathered and dusted. My shares I invested in the airline industries for partriotic purposes some months ago gave the vibes a nice chill-well and gone up ten percent (roughly a grand in US dollars). Now . . . should I sell them now, or wait as I had in my original strategy for about five years for it to hit the levels it was some 2 years ago ?
I could use this money to build a grid of sorts and generate electricity for the masses . . . or take it to the casino’s and have a good ole time ??
its a bigger cover story for the japanese to build a space death ray DUN DUN DUN.
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It’s not our problem if it fails. It’s Japan’s.
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Japan happens to be the country that gives us a large portion of our electronics devices. They may be manufactured in China and the corporations may be owned in the US, but the engineering of a lot of stuff happens in Japan. They know electricity
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No one here is thinking about the future. Fusion and Fission nuclear power are great right now, but what will your children’s children’s children think about the toxic messes you’ve left them? Fission creates waste that we STILL don’t know what to do with. We just store it for now, but the shit will have the potential to create massive ecological damage even thousands of years from now. Fusion is cleaner, theoretically, but still requires that there be toxic waste, even in the best case scenarios.
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While Japan might be powering 300,000 homes right now, how much energy will they be using in 50 years. The more we learn about electricity, the more efficient we can be with it. By the time this array is built and working, they might be able to power a lot more than 300,000 homes.
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There are so many other ways to generate and collect energy besides nuclear and fossil fuels that are being utterly ignored. Besides wind and solar there’s also tidal and geothermal. Not to mention the various claims of electromagnetic motors that can produce more energy than they consume. People think those guys are crackpots, but I fail to see how a magnet can’t be a store of energy. Electricity obviously is a very powerful form of energy, and electricity and magnetism are both bound by the electromagnetic force. They’re essentially the same force in different forms.
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Free energy is dangerous to our current way of life. It’s not just a threat to power companies, it’s a threat to the entire idea of capitalism. Do you realize what would happen if energy were free? The current fossil fuel systems would be obsolete overnight. If there was a system to produce free energy for the entire world right now the fossil fuel corporations would refuse to put forth the fuel to build the infrastructure. I guarantee it. They’d rather see the world go to hell, so long as it depends on their fuel to get there. Ignore anything these corporations say about things like this.
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At the end of the day, this is still just a temporary solution. There are tons of ways of generating energy here that would be more viable, but I do like the fact that they’re actually looking into the idea of collecting energy from space. I mean, just look at how much there is available. We’re constantly being bombarded with energy from all directions. I see no problem with looking into collecting that energy. I think Japan has a good idea, but I think it’s one that should stay in the ‘idea’ phase for a while
