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I was reading the article about scooters , and started thinking about where the electricity will come from.
Taiwan has a fairly active oil industry, and also burns a lot of coal,
but doesn't do a lot to use the renewable resources at its disposal.
For some reason, the Chen government committed to tripling the amount
of electricity produced from natural gas between 2000 and 2010. At that
time the price of gas was less then $3/1000 cu ft, and now it's often
more than $10. (Last year it touched $15 for a while.)
For more information, take a look at this report by the DoE in the US
. It's a few years old but contains a lot of useful information, such
as the fact that hydro-electric power accounts for less than 2% of
Taiwan's energy supply.
So, how do you make renewable energy in Taiwan? Well, the most
obvious answer is probably from solar energy. But that's a bit erratic,
and it's also very fragile. At least, it's fragile if you use
traditional photo-voltaic panels which would probably be trashed by
some of the rainstorms and typhoons we get here.
But here's a simple alternative: You use the sun to heat up some
liquid at a site near the coast. (Taiwan has plenty of coast!) And you
also pipe seawater into the same site, which if it's coming from
reasonably deep is going to be nice and cool. So now you have a
temperature differential, hot water and cold water side by side, and
there are all sorts of heat engines that can be placed in between them
to make electricity. I'm a big fan of the concept of the Stirling Engine , although I have yet to see one in action. It sounds like the perfect device for this application.
But Taiwan doesn't need to be totally reliant on the sun for heat
energy. Anyone who has been here for any period of time knows that
Taiwan is geologically very active. We get earthquakes, and there is
hot water gushing out of the ground at sites all over the island.
Surely if you drill down you're going to find hot rocks pretty quickly?
Geothermal energy sounds like a great way forward.
And there's more!
If we're talking of temperature differentials, then we need go just a few miles off the east coast for something really great. There's an ocean current called the Kuroshio , which brings warm water from the equator right past Taiwan and on up to Japan. First described by Zhou Chufei in 1178, the Kuroshio averages 24 degrees celsius in temperature whereas the deep ocean water below it is typically at less than 4 degrees. So that's a fairly constant temperature differential of 20 degrees just waiting for someone to exploit it. Here's an article talking about how to do it .
And finally, talking of the Kuroshio, if you have steady stream of water 100km across moving fairly quickly then the total amount of energy present is huge. You would only need to capture a small fraction of that to meet all your needs. So why not simply float turbines in the stream where they can convert some of that kinetic energy to electricity? There has been some talk recently about shrouded turbines which sounds really intriguing.
(I don't know how deep the current runs, but found references in the research to people taking measurements at depths of over 1000 metres. No problem to keep the turbines deep enough that typhoons and shipping would be irrelevant.)
Recommend this article...
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