mokshasha says:
January 2, 2011 at 7:53 pm

hhhmmm – sorry to butt into this seeming private blog of “eclipse”, but i wanted to comment on this article about Sonnenschiff – (gosh – hope i’m not off base…)

my partner and i lived in this development 5 years ago – it is amazing in the efficiency it has achieved -but the lifestyle is very European, would probably not translate well to lifestyle-dysfunctional Amerika – very adequate but small and creative spaces, super efficient materials and pretty comfy, and (OMG) you could astually WALK to a all necessities – grocery, day goods, bakeries. I cannot say it was very overall a very attractive design and the solar on the roof (under which are the bedrooms) was somehow energetically uncomfortable (can’t put my finger on why… – perhaps emf’s??)

anyway – sorry to disrupt the almost totally Sonnenschiff-unrelated discussion here – perhaps inhabitat and eclipse could take their completely off-subject discussion elsewhere – maybe exchange phone numbers and duke it out there??

Sorry if I’ve apparently dominated the energy conversation here, and I totally agree with your point! I’m a HUGE fan of New Urbanism and rave about it to everyone.

Have you seen this youtube? It’s a 4 minute message that sums up all the benefits of walkability to a really funky beat. I might just have to watch it again, the 300th time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJt_YXIoJI

The point is getting there!

And I would much rather live next door to a Chinese AP1000 reactor than a coal power station, which is what you’ll get stuck with if greenies insist on a 100% renewable world. Because 100% renewable grids don’t work yet, pure and simple.

my partner and i lived in this development 5 years ago – it is amazing in the efficiency it has achieved -but the lifestyle is very European, would probably not translate well to lifestyle-dysfunctional Amerika – very adequate but small and creative spaces, super efficient materials and pretty comfy, and (OMG) you could astually WALK to a all necessities – grocery, day goods, bakeries. I cannot say it was very overall a very attractive design and the solar on the roof (under which are the bedrooms) was somehow energetically uncomfortable (can’t put my finger on why… – perhaps emf’s??)

anyway – sorry to disrupt the almost totally Sonnenschiff-unrelated discussion here – perhaps inhabitat and eclipse could take their completely off-subject discussion elsewhere – maybe exchange phone numbers and duke it out there??

i mean – do these threads have a moderator or what?

Why must we always think there is a ‘one size fits all’ solution to every problem?
No one wants a nuclear reactor, raised levels of co2, or a smart grid (only for the energy companies), marching through their neighborhood.
Energy generated closest to its use means you look at your neighborhood and design accordingly. You have much wind, do wind. Sun, do solar. Waves? Geothermal? etc….
Conservation and improved insulation, the topper.
Lets get creative and safe!
…oh, and lets get rid of the profit-motive…
climate change is a global community problem. Lets get a global community answer.

Kathleen

Thus storage and sharing won’t allow us to have secure stable electricity, but instead would leave us with large fluctuations (and thus blackouts, if unmanaged) as soon as we introduce wind at a significant share (which might be as low as roughly 10% across entire larger grid areas, not just in small isolated situations like Denmark). With hydro not truly scalable, the only remaining technologies are fossil fuels, mainly natural gas, which for its flexibility and relatively low price work best. Or in other words: in a world without abundant natural gas (or an equivalent flexible stock), large market shares of wind simply won’t work.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6957

Oh, and as well as building the Smart AND Super Grid we’ve got to build out the renewables 5 or 6 times over. It might *just* be technically possible to have a 24 hour reliable renewable grid, but most nations would be bankrupt before they got there.

When environmentalists like George Monbiot and Dr Barry Brook are bagging out solar PV as a waste or time and toy, then you know something’s up. Again, I’m only a recent convert to nuclear power. I’ve wished for and read up on Smart-Super-grids and how ‘when the sun isn’t shining the wind is blowing, and if that isn’t happening the water is flowing or the wood is ready to burn in the steam generator’ blah blah blah. I’ve been gullible enough to believe in all that stuff. But when Denmark’s wind dies down it buys in electricity from France’s nukes.

After 10 years of building nukes Frances Co2 output is about 90grams / kWh.

After 20 years of building wind turbines Denmarks is 650g. Go figure!

With nuclear power we don’t have to overbuild the wind and solar and wave power by a factor of 5 just to make sure the power is running sometime, some where. With nuclear power we don’t have to rebuild an entire grid system. With nuclear power we don’t have to play games with guessing the weather. We can just mass produce today’s AP1000′s on an assembly line, plug them in to replace coal fired power plants on TODAY’s grid with TODAY’s technology. And when the GenIV plants such as the S-PRISM are finally commercialised, we’ll have all that lovely depleted uranium to feed into GenIV reactors and run the world for the next million years or so as we look for even better solutions. My guess is by the time we’ve burnt today’s waste in 500 years, we’ll have super-batteries and storage mechanisms that will finally make renewable power workable. Or not. Maybe the particle smasher at CERN will have confirmed something exotic about the universe and we’ll have something totally new! But while it is nice to DREAM about worldwide grids and Mr Fusion, I’m talking abot technologies we can use right now. Today.

You can’t go past nuclear.

To play devil’s advocate, listing people is a logical fallacy. You can find a respectable scientist that agrees with almost every potentially valid view, a zone that both nuclear reactors and solar suburban areas fall into. It’s better to make the argument than to appeal to authority on the issue.

Also, I’m much more likely to put a solar panel on my roof than a nuclear reactor in my basement.

But energy conservation only reduces the amount of baseload electricity we need… we still need that baseload, reliable power. It’s going to take an awful lot of time and money and ENERGY to build out the energy efficient civilisation I’m dreaming of! We’re already in the frying pan, and I’m looking for a BIG leap out that doesn’t fall half way and land us in the fire.

Check the top 3 video’s on my “Rezone” page.

http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/

The benefits of passive solar design, diversity of function and density of settlement accumulate with incredible social and local economic benefits.

So nuclear power for a quick baseload power upgrade, but New Urbanism for all the benefits that can encourage as well.

http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/

Check some of the names.

* Board of Directors
* Dr. James Hansen
* Dr. Evgeny Velikhov
* Tom Blees, President
* Dr. Barry Brook
* Dr. Yoon Chang
* Steve Kirsch, MIT S.M.
* Dr. George S. Stanford
* Joe Shuster
* Dr. Dan Meneley
* Dr. Louis J. Circeo
* Dr. Charles Till
* Dr. Eugene Preston
* Dr. Ray Hunter
* Dr. Baldev Raj
* Dr. William Hannum
* Leonard J. Koch
* Dr. Jeff Eerkens
* Bruno Comby
* Dr. Charles B. Archambeau
* Dr. John Sackett

Which is a good thing, because instead of storing it for 100 thousand years, we only have to store it for 300. By the time we’d burnt all today’s ‘waste’ in 500 years, we’d be de-commissioning the storage of the first 200 years of *real* waste.