You're out of touch.

In the American west, railroads use solar power to supply and control
switching gear, such as warning signals and hydraulic-electric track
switching.  In some cities, traffic lighting operates almost entirely on
solar energy, TO SAVE MONEY.

I can't speak for other countries. But the situation in the USA is this:

In the late 40's the US proceeded with atomic bomb development. Once they'd
created enough bombs to last for the forseeable future (50,000 or so), they
wondered what they were going to do with the thousands of highly skilled
Nuclear engineers and physicists they'd fathered. So they invented a means
of generating heat with the nuclear bomb, and created a nuclear power
plant? Same as a petroleum plant, except that the heat is generated by
nuclear chain reaction. Simple, right?

In fact, were atomic bombs NOT the primary product, no nuclear power plant
would be economically viable. The problem of waste, which has a half-life
of 100,000 years, is so serious that nobody in their right mind plans on
using or making more nuclear power plants for the purpose of electrical
generation. Processing fuel cells for the spent uranium after they are used
to generate electricity is the primary way weapons-grade plutonium is made,
see? Notice that countries NOT interested in bombs have few (or NO) nuclear
power plants.

Now, lets look at solar power. 95% of all long-term space vehicles generate
their power from solar cells (the rest? fuel cells, but one or two use
nuclear energy). Yet in the past 5 years, explosive improvements have been
made, and solar cells can be made that convert 80+%  of the sunlight
striking it. The conversion is made with little heat, and as DC is easy to
control and use to generate  electricity. It needs NO heat, it needs no
water. The cells last 20+ years without replacement.

Wind farms are very successful, thanks to some excellent designs from
Holland and Sweden. Didn't you read about the flap with the wind farm to be
put out at sea 10 miles from Cape Cod? These electromechanical devices have
more maintainence than solar, but return on investment in less than 8
years, less in califiornia, where they shined during the recent power
shortages there.

No, the return on investment is good enough to do it on a grand scale. But
they won't. Politicians are rarely visionaries. These are certainly not.

--Bob

At 05:15 PM 7/14/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>If its so "trivial" one would think there would be a good many more solar
>farms out there.  Same goes for wind farms.  People have been working on
>these for a long time; why isn't there a more resonable return on investment
>yet if it can be done so easily?
>
>----- Original Message ----- >
> > Incredible, since I swelter every day of the year living in a place with
> > endless sunshine- an energy source totally free, without waste, without a
> > storage problem, the ORIGINAL source of all energy on earth. It would be
> > trivial to trap that sunshine and turn it into electricity, and would
> > provide some US engineers a few jobs, too.
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
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