Kevyn
That idea of a piezo layer to generate power from traffic vibrations is counter-productive. The power generated would be less than the increased rolling resistance of the vehicles, which in turn are likely to be powered (more or less inefficiently) from electricity in some form. Better is to have a more rigid road surface to reduce the rolling resistance.

Buried power cables are only relatively cheap at low voltage/low current, i.e. low power levels. At higher power levels, higher currents give more heat to deal with. This can be reduced by using a higher voltage, but that takes more insulation. It can be done, but is simply uneconomic for long distances. Overhead wires are easy to cool and air is all the insulation they need – except at the pylons of course.

Trevor.

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Turnip argued “its not the sunshine hours its the land use, those areas that are getting the sunshine also produce the food, you can’t have both.” and “I was driving through the Mojave Desert”.

Because all areas have roads we can get both food and electricity from sunshine. It just requires switching from flexible surfaces that need resealing every 14 years to glass slab surfaces that need re-etching every 25 years. The glass slabs can have as many layers as you want but three is the minimum. The top is the traction surface. The second is the electronics layer, containing pc cells, storage capacitors, LEDs for “painting” the road surface. The third layer is the chassis, and distributes power from the electronics layer and carries data signals phone, TV, internet, electronic tolling, real-time traffic data, etc. A potential fourth layer is to use peizocrystals to generate power from traffic vibrations.

Incorporating the power distribution function into the roadway surface instead of using wires on roadside poles is safer, stormproof and no more expensive than maintaining and upgrading the existing wires.

In simple terms, this is the silver bullet solution, but not just for AGW, for peak oil and the infrastructure deficit as well.

http://www.solarroadways.com/Introduction.htm

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> I’ve written to Cullen enough, I may as well write to Bill English. Chances are excellent he’ll be no more sensible than Cullen was on this issue.

Yeah good luck. I’d love to see cheaper housing (building land), but have yet to hear a government of any persuasion argue for it.

What amazes me is the idea of social housing as a way of bringing in cheaper houses. It is particularly mad in the UK where council restrictions push up the price of houses to levels only high income people can afford, and then the same councils bring in social housing to try to cater for the rest of the market. Duh.

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Optimist

It is government on every level here. The motives are different at the local level, there the legacy of the English model which requires the council to back the house’s livability seems to be the primary problem. Don’t really know why they have any position at all in some of the things that they get involved in, but the NZ government is no less at odds with the idea of making houses affordable instead of investments.

I’ve written to Cullen enough, I may as well write to Bill English. Chances are excellent he’ll be no more sensible than Cullen was on this issue.

respectfully
BJ

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I don’t have a problem with a cap that high as long as it is PRECEEDED by those technologies coming online first.

What worries me is the pretense that coal use is “only short term” but then discovering that population policies allow the energy needs to creep up to the point it no longer seems financially viable to rely on the more expensive green energy choices.

I feel a population policy needs to be the primary goal, then any increase in population (eg immigration etc) has to be accompanied by some sort of tax/toll or at least some sort of plan to build adequate green infrastructure to support that growth without recourse to dirty technologies.

Obviously the coal use should be available when required as a sort of “baseload” reservoir, but not relied upon as the mainstay indefinitely into the future.

(ie: in our current financial climate it could be considered acceptable to run coalfired stations as a short term solution till we are rich enough to start a new period of “green infrastructure” development, but then the coal use would tail off again. I know it might not suit some business models, but we have to be innovative)

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Given our wind, wave, geothermal and other unexploited renewable resources, perhaps that cap should be around 15-20 million. Plenty of people would like to emigrate here once conditions deteriorate elsewhere.

Trevor.

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# bjchip Says:
The TRANSITION would kill us…
The end state might be survivable, but we would not recognize the place and we’d lose everything we’ve ever built.

You’re probably right.

Which is why I now have very little time for the AGW debate. The irony is this: those who are most likely to survive upcoming climatic changes are those who retain access to high energy output generation such as nuclear and thermal.

Which, I suspect, is why governments don’t give much traction to green technologies and initiatives.

It is already too late.

Not too late to save the planet, but too late to change the minds of enough people to enable an adequate change in direction.

It is too late to find a financial way forward for those whose lives are tightly bound to their current transportation modes, and energy sources.

And current economic times only make it less likely that we can invest adequately in alternatives.

I could be wrong. There could suddenly be an explosion in the numbers of humans who decide that they want to drop the trappings of modern lifestyles, and return to shanks’s pony.

I still say New Zealands only hope of avoiding a coal-based future is to focus on setting a population goal that could be sustainable with green energies.

Without a limited population as the primary goal, there will always be a point at which green energy alone will not provide what we need.

Our stand on nuclear power was a huge decision, and in my view the right one.

We now need the same courage to say that NZ population will be capped at (say) 5 million, then slowly work towards practical green energies that generate adequately.

At the same time however, we need to retain coal and other high output energy sources as a means of survival if indeed climatic conditions become as rough as many suggest.

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I don’t have a problem with Don selling our coal to China. We can use the revenue to buy wind turbines (the big 3 MW ones, not the dinky little ones) and geothermal plant and perhaps some wave powered units like Pelamis. We have easily several times the renewable resources that we need to generate all our electricity. We don’t need to burn more coal for electricity. We could burn less, using it primarily as a “dry year” reserve. Eventually the coal, oil and gas will run out so we will need to use alternatives anyway.

Trevor.

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> If the government weren’t so HELL bent on making sure house prices stay higher than they should be, we’d all be better off.

Absolutely, this is a major thing holding as back as a country. It ties up massive amounts of capital in something which could be quite cheap.

But do you mean local government? It is the councils that seems to try to stop new development.

Environmentalists make a wierd distinction between evil developers and lovely sweet homeowners. Yes one is a customer of the other. Hurt the developers and the homeowners pay the bill.

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Greengeek

The TRANSITION would kill us…

The end state might be survivable, but we would not recognize the place and we’d lose everything we’ve ever built.

BJ

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Excellent suggestion PP. If the government would allow tax rebates for green technologies it would be very helpful.

Frog…what actually WOULD happen if a significant portion of coal was used up and that sequestered carbon returned back to the atmosphere from whence it came??

Would it not permit a more friendly atmosphere which would lead to a re-afforestation of some of the global deserts?

Is it really advisable to want to maintain the status quo where so much of the worlds useable moisture is locked up in ice at the poles??

Doesn’t Antarctica have dinosaur bones aplenty suggesting that it was once a habitable place? Wasn’t the Sahara once an inhabitable place?

Wouldn’t it be ok to go back to an earlier time?

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Paranoid Peter

The only problem with them doing this through a tax rebate for putting them on houses is that it is YET ANOTHER benefit to the landlord paid for by taxes on everyone… otherwise I like it a lot.

If the government weren’t so HELL bent on making sure house prices stay higher than they should be, we’d all be better off.

respectfully
BJ

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I think we will have to make a choice between coal or no electricity very soon. We must be scrapping the bottom of the barrel with Maui so when that finally runs out we could have problems with electricity. I think Maui supplies about 25% of our electricity
If we have as much coal as Don mentioned then we are indeed the lucky country and if we don’t use it then China will. That way China doesn’t run out of electricity but we do.
I like the idea of rooftop solar panels but that technology is changing very rapidly and the latest solar technology sounds good. If the govn wants the local citizens to stick up personal windmills and solar panels then they should give tax rebates. In Europe I think they get 50% tax rebate so to keep off the coal we could do somehting like that.

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I may have missed it, but have the Greens come out in support of the UK’s new tax on long haul flights which Key was contesting?

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frog Says: IceBaby – clean coal is an oxymoron. The operative part being moron. Coal will never be clean. Even if we manage to sequester the CO2, which would be great, it doesn’t make it clean.

Frog…where did the carbon in that coal come from????? Presumably at some point in history it was floating around in the atmosphere.

Doesn’t it belong there???

Is it morally right to lock it up underground forever when it once roamed free providing food for hungry plantiferous lifeforms?

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sunrgi does a solar concentrator. More power per cm2 of cell, while nanosolar makes cheap cells. Both are competitive with coal on cost per watt.

BJ

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Jacobs and Masters cooked the books. Notice that word “direct” in front of “cost”.

The unreliability and variation in wind generation generates many downstream costs with the need for back up and smoothing and also extra transmissions lines because normally major transmission lines are built in low wind areas.

That is why wind is no longer being pursued with any vigour in the UK and Europe.

HIdden subsidies make these calculations very difficult. As the following discussion points out:
“Metcalf’s “level playing field” calculation (economic depreciation and no production or investment tax credits) pegs the levelized cost of the cheapest electricity source – conventional coal – at 3.79¢ per kWh. Next comes “clean coal” (integrated gasification combined cycle) at 4.37¢ per kWh. Next comes natural gas at 5.61¢ per kWh. Then comes nuclear at 5.94¢ per kWh – about the same as biomass-fired electricity at 5.95¢ per kWh. Bringing up the rear in Metcalf’s level playing field calculations are wind (6.64¢ per kWh), solar thermal (18.82¢ per kWh), and solar PV (37.39¢ per kWh). The right-most column – the “no tax” calculation – is simply costs under the existing regime (the “current law” category on the far left side of the table, which includes existing production and tax credits and federal depreciation rules) but assumes zero taxes … an interesting calculation given that nuclear energy’s cost numbers go UP under a zero-tax regime given that nuclear energy generators face a negative effective average tax rate.”

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Have you ever been there Owen? Any number of of houses would be a travesty. And these houses will NOT be lived in. They will be beach houses for the rich. Another Omaha. Probably used at most 3 weeks in the year. This is not the way to solve a housing shortage.

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The Herald celebrates fewer houses being built in this article.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10545018

“The trust was granted an adjournment to a district-plan change hearing in July after 1700 submissions were received, almost all opposing the second round of proposals, which cut the number of homes from 1400 to 850.

Now it has cut the number of houses from 850 to 180, hoping it will be a case of third time lucky.
The trust, a joint venture between local iwi Te Uri o Hau and Queenstown developer New Zealand Land Trust, proposes creating a coastal park and building a resort called Te Arai Park in the centre of Mangawhai North Forest.”

One way to make housing available is to build more of them.

We are short of houses but over half of NZ is now in DoC estate or other parks. Most countries aspire to 10%.

The project would have created about 7,000 trademens’ jobs and another 50,000 downstream jobs.

You would not know we are trying to build and trade our way out of recession.

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bj – what is “sunrgi”?

Trevor.

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