Distributed solar energy...

I currently have solar panels on about 35% of the roof area of my house, and I have reduced my electricity cost to near (but not quite) zero.  With 80% roof coverage, then, I could provide a surplus equal to what I am using.

According to the chart, Total Electrical Generation is 38.1 quads (with 25.7 going to "rejected", 67% waste -- what's up with that??).

What's interesting here is that the electrical infrastructure, unlike other energy infrastructure, is intrinsically bi-directional -- if the consumers were turned into producers, they can send power back out over the same wires that they are currently using to receive power.

This means that if residential and commercial customers turned into producers (eg, residential and commercial solar that on net produced as much surplus energy as they had been using), they could completely supply the current industrial use of electricity, even accounting for a 2/3 energy loss (to "rejected").

So, from a pure capacity and distribution infrastructure point of view, all current electric power generation facilities could be replaced by distributed local generation and storage, using the current grid.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/LLNLUSEnergy2012.png

Originally shared by Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD)

Originally shared by Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD)

Laniakea: Our Home Supercluster of Galaxies
Image Credit: R. Brent Tully (U. Hawaii) et al., SDvision, DP, CEA/Saclay
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140910.html

It is not only one of the largest structures known -- it is our home. The just-identified Laniakea Supercluster of galaxies contains thousands of galaxies that includes our Milky Way Galaxy, the Local Group of galaxies, and the entire nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The colossal supercluster is shown in the above computer-generated visualization, where green areas are rich with white-dot galaxies and white lines indicate motion towards the supercluster center. An outline of Laniakea is given in orange, while the blue dot shows our location. Outside the orange line, galaxies flow into other galatic concentrations. The Laniakea Supercluster spans about 500 million light years and contains about 100,000 times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discoverers of Laniakea gave it a name that means "immense heaven" in Hawaiian.

Originally shared by nixCraft

Originally shared by nixCraft

Want to run Linux on old laptop/hardware? Try DSLR (Damn Small Linux Remake) http://dslr.dimakrasner.com/

#linux   #distro   #kernel   #oldhardware

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