Arr wave power. I thought it too showed some potential but to date out here to no avail. It was one of the "new, green projects" followed by endless green jobs to be created and all that has happened to date is several "dreams" smashed to pieces around the Australian coast looking like ships that run aground using hundreds of millions of dollars from the "Green Energy Fund" created by literally doubling our power bills that is supplied by our coal fired power plants. As for the wind turbines. The turbines out here, made in Finland by the way so no local green job creation there, are only idle when they are having maintenance, require maintenance or awaiting parts from Finland.
As for nuclear. Certainly not my choice either but seeing as we supply the world with it's supply, why not?. Japan has none, it comes from here. France has none, it comes from here. Germany has none, it comes from here. This country is the most stable, earthquake proof on the planet and we don't use what we sell for our power generation?.. I can assure you us Aussies won't go building a reactor on the beach that faces the ocean that is prone to tsunamis like one of our customers of our high grade Uranium thought was a grand idea. Nor would we be powering the pumps required for circulating the coolant water around the rods using "only" power created from the power plant itself without so much as a back up generator. And I doubt very much we would have ran and totally deserted the crippled nuclear power plant when it needed immediate attention that could have stopped such a catastrophe. I'm not implying we would have been as brave as the Russians using there ideas of burying the crippled reactor in wet concrete dropped by helicopters knowing it meant certain death but I was surprised at the total evacuation that happened at Fukashema. What happened to all the relatives of the kamikaze I remember thinking when that story hit the News.
One thing important to remember when changing one form of energy into another is learnt in Science at school and that is you always have losses so therefore would it not be best to leave it in it's present form rather than trying to make a new form adding looses when you are actually out to achieve economical use of resources?. This is the whole reason we use coal. Not to keep it in it's present form but because it has so much energy, we can afford to loose massive amounts of it creating the new form, it is still a viable proposition.
I think leaving solar as it's original form of energy as heat is far smarter than using panels to convert it to DC electrical energy and then convert that DC electrical energy to AC electricity. That is energy being changed 3 times and we are in the quest for efficiency and that is from a form of energy that doesn't have a whole lot to loose to start with unlike coal.
Wind I believe will never be viable because it costs so much to use that form of energy even if it is free from the planet as the waves are proving to be. We just cannot or have not made suitable equipment that can harness such energy.
I did once see a fine idea of converting one energy form to another that I thought showed enormous promise though. One smart guy saw that in plumbing he was working on, there was a section of pipe that was suffering from "water hammer" and this was heating up that section of pipe. He went back to his workshop and created a "water hammer machine". It was very basic but it worked extremely well. It was basically a solid drum shaped block of metal spinning in the center on a shaft mounted on bearings and this drum spun inside an outer housing. The drum had 90 degree holes bored into the side of the drum and lined up with holes bored from a side of the drum forming a through hole bored in the metal that went around a 90 degree bend inside the drum so what was actually happening was water was going in one side and coming back out at 90 degrees from where it went in. The outer housing had holes that would line up with the holes in the drum twice per drum revolution and the drum was powered by a small motor. Now this setup I saw had about 15 holes about 1/2" each in size and the unit was powered by a 1/2Hp electric motor that was spinning the inner drum. As the drum was sped up via the electric motor on a speed controller, the water would go from luke warm to boiling simply by speeding up the center as the water was being feed from the outer housing, through the inner drum and out the outer drum's other side. Now this device was shown to scientists that did a whole heap of measuring and they confirmed this setup was actually using significantly less energy to heat cold water than man had ever been able to achieve in the past. Man's approach had always been to heat water using an electric coil submerged in the water to make the water hot but this system was only using electrical energy to spin a motor which is requiring far less.
It is an idea like this that is really required to win this award and the cash. Thinking outside the square.
not such a silly idea really they could create the transistors and fets on the silicon solar cells them selves to give you ac output ?
