B L  OW I  N G     IN THE WIND

The Answers to All the World’s Questions…

The Solutions to all the World’s Problems

                                      Are already here – They have always been here…

BLOWIN’  IN THE WIND

By Dusty Schoch, DW Foreign Policy Editor

  I can hear you saying….What problems???  You mean ALL of them?  You mean everything from the war in the Middle East to global warming….all the problems have answers that…have always been here, right in front of us?

Frankly, and amazingly, yes. To all.  Sit down and prepare to have your mind blown. The final solution to all complex issues is always the simplest and today’s problems are no exception. Einstein’s E=MC2 is really simple  they say if your mind can grasp quantum physics. You just have to get over life-long habits of looking at time and space as things your clock and ruler can qualitatively gauge.

We’ve all heard, but regularly we forget to follow the two major rules for thinking and problem solving – (1) The KISS RULE (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) and (2) Occam’s Razor (When Multiple Solutions Appear Capable of Solving the Same Problem, The Simplest One is Most Often The Best One.)

What, then do I propose as the “simplest solution” for every major  problem we face today, and why did I invoke the  refrain of Bob Dylan’s anti-war song to cap my thesis?

Let me tease you a little more by asking that we agree on what the major problems today are and …why they are.  I’ll assume the role of omniscient God and simply tell you what and why they are.   Now–about what I might leave out or get wrong–we can pray about that later.

THE PROBLEMS

1. We have too many people on earth (over 6.2 Billion) and as a result we are aggressively competing to control and consume diminishing limited resources (oil, arable land, potable water and protein…in that general order).
2. As a result of (1) we have problem #2- Wars. Iraq is not about tyranny or religion; it is about control of the world’s diminishing supply of fossil  fuel. If you have any doubts about this at this point,  I suggest you not bother reading any further.
3. We create chemicals that poison the planet and now have changed its climate to the point global warming may make us and all life on the planet extinct unless we find—and implement—the solution to the problems before the “tipping” point in time comes and it is too late to reverse
   global warming.
4. Scientists have informed all the governments of the world about the solution to the problems just outlined, but the governments will not implement those solutions because the governments everywhere are controlled by corporations whose lives (dollar profit) depend on our continued consumption of their polluting energy and products.  (This, #4 problem, is the most challenging one I’ll solve for you in this thesis; in fact it’s the only tough one. Problems 1 through 3 are a breeze….literally….they are, as Dylan and I both said in tandem….blowing in the wind. So I’ll solve this final  problem (4) …last.

TEASING OVER…

The Solutions to Problems 1,2 and 3 are all in fact not only blowin’ in the wind—

The solution is in fact…the wind.

There’s really nothing new under the sun, they say, and they’re right. The solution to today’s problems is the solution to the problem Christopher Columbus (O.K. probably some Viking before him) solved in order to “discover” America. It was wind alone that powered boats and people and supplies over here for literally centuries before we started steaming across the Atlantic by burning coal and diesel. What on earth accounts for  this conversion from…literally free, infinitely-renewable and non-polluting wind power to expensive (very) , finite, and polluting (very) fossil fuel?  Without getting into an exhaustible debate comparing the efficiency of yesterday’s “tall ships” and today’s trans-Atlantic tankers, I’ll concede the diesel-powered ships today can haul more and faster. And there are wind-powered turbines out there converting wind to electrical energy for …well…nothing. But there are sailboats today that can both in theory and fact sail faster than anything but a nuclear sub. I in fact personally sailed a 50-foot catamaran to St. Johns that did 44 knots—easy.

But…back to what’s really blowin’ in the wind: Back to solutions which are immediately doable, and immediately capable of solving all the important problems in the world (except ethnically-driven overpopulation and corporate-driven politics).  Wind.

Why wind power…instead of nuclear, hydrogen, or solar?  (I’ll give this the short shrift it warrants:  Nuke plants create toxic waste hard to store and spread technology that some stupid country (besides us) will once again use to extinguish large numbers of living things.  A bad idea if options exist….and they do.  Hydrogen?  It’s clean but the truth is no scientist has yet devised a way to produce it without expending about as much conventional energy as produced in the process. The jury’s still out, then, with Hydrogen. Solar?  It’s great, wonderful and promising, but at the present time and state of art, it’s six times as expensive as wind power.

WHAT IN THE WORLD IS NEW ABOUT WIND, THEN?

There may be nothing “new” under the sun, but there’s clearly a new reason to look to wind for the solution to all our problems, which are primarily about energy.  And the reason is this:

We can now “grid it.”

Explanation:  We’ve been looking at wind the wrong way all along.  Where the wind blows enough to put wind farms (great forests of bladed wind turbines that convert earthly breeze to electrical energy), it only blows SOME OF THE TIME.

When we need power, the  wind might not be blowing, and so we have to depend on electricity supplied by our neighborhood-polluting company, Duke power, which is burning acid-rain-making and global-warming coal to convert our dollars to air-conditioned comfort and hot water.

But do we? (have to depend on Duke) The answer is no longer “yes”.  We’ve been looking at wind the wrong way…the traditional way. We’re looking at it in ISOLATION.  Most of the wind machines we’re familiar with work in isolation, like those beautiful singing windmills on the hills of Holland and Portugal. They’re put in places where the wind hardly ever stops, and as a result, their  grinding stones are pretty much active whenever the grain needs grinding.

Similarly, we think of windmills as those things attached to farmer Brown’s well pump and water tower. Farmer Brown’s farm is so far out in rural Idaho where  there’s no nearby town Duke power supplies that can send him coal-generated electricity over a wire linked  to its electric-power grid. With farmer Brown, the water tower acts like a “battery” for energy storage. The wind and water pump the windmill powers blows and flows only about 25 percent of the time, but even while farmer Brown sleeps, the water tower is filling with water…which just like energy stored in a lead battery, he can call on by turning on his tap the next morning he’s up even when the wind is…not.

Similarly, we’ve grown to think of windmills as being most useful to the rural home-owner who’s either “off the grid” or wanting to be “independent” of the electrical grid that unites power supply and consumer. Because of that view, home-use windmills have been designed and provided with battery arrays (Nearly a whole basement full of batteries are  needed to store the electricity generated by both solar panels and wind turbines because the sun and  wind are …inconstant—i.e., efficient only about 25 percent of the time).

THE GRID FLOWS BOTH WAYS NOW

Thank providence, (and some authentic legislators) things have changed. Now, unless you live in some area of rural America that some power company can’t supply electricity via its “grid”, you live “on the grid”. And now the grid flows both ways.  In most states now, with the increased implementation of residential solar and wind generators, power companies are required to buy back from you electricity you create which you don’t use. In other words, when you’re connected to the Duke Power grid in High Point, NC, and you have either solar or wind power on the roof, you no longer need to store it in a battery array in the basement to derive optimum benefit from your wind turbine. When you’re watching TV or running the washing machine and the wind is blowing, you are using your own wind power; when your asleep and the lights (etc.) are off, and the wind is blowing, electricity produced by your turbine goes backwards…out to the Duke Power grid, as a result of which, your power meter goes in reverse so that at the end of the month you are credited with the electricity you gave back!  The implications of this are cataclysmically important for us and the environment. Whether at the end of the month you have a little balance to pay or a credit balance, it doesn’t matter—at least environmentally.

Here’s why:  If we all—every one of us on the Duke Power, Con-Ed and other corporate power grids had wind turbines on our residences, none of us would need to buy those expensive battery arrays which made wind power so expensive in the first place. And if all of us have wind power and are sharing it with each other using Duke power as our “grid battery”, we’ll all be using wind-power electricity all the time and the coal furnaces and turbines will be shut down.

It’s now—and for the reason just stated—economically feasible for us all to afford wind-powered generators because we no longer technically need batteries, unless we’re trying to be independent and isolated retirees on remote Montana ranches. (Google it for yourself, but I’d estimate the cost of the batteries remains half or more than half the material cost of wind power…and it’s no longer necessary…unless, as said, you’re in Montana.)

Here’s the epiphany in our energy conundrum – If and when we all have wind turbines on our houses (which will cost us –without batteries—under $10,000 apiece, which should be recouped by tax supplements) we would all be consuming nothing but pollution-free electrical power because , collectively, we would be sending Duke more power than Duke is sending us.  Don’t you see?—When we’re all of us producing electrical power from the wind that blows on our houses about 25 percent of the time, electricity enough for all of us will be flowing into the grid ALL THE TIME, and as a result, no coal or other fossil fuel gets burned, and the accelerator for global warming is…off. 

And so is our dependence on or need to have anything to do with our Middle Eastern friends …. and foes. Our dollar-draining relationships with Duke Power and the  OPEC’ER Sheiks of Saudi Arabia killed with a single stone…that stone that’s been the whole time, blowin’ in the wind.

Don’t you see?  When every home is generating wind power 25 percent of the time, DUKE POWER’S GRID BECOMES OUR COLLECTIVE  “STORAGE BATTERY” for wind-generated electrical energy and we collectively get to stop burning coal, and in the process stop polluting and warming the globe. 

I’ve talked to and read it from reliable scientific sources—because this is no secret—it could clearly work.

BUT I SAID “ALL THE PROBLEMS”

What About Automobile Pollution?

I hear you:  Residential and industrial energy consumption can be cleaned up by using existing power grids as wind-power storage facilities. But what about the other 40 or fifty percent of globally-warming pollution coming out of our automobiles? All-electric (forget hybrids) cars are the only long-term solution. But, if we all have electric cars, there’s still that problem with totally non-polluting electric cars—all those expensive and heavy batteries embedded in the lower chassis that cost big and deliver small…We charge them overnight in the garage and the best of them have a range of 60 to 100 miles. That’s only half a commute for a significant number of our suburban lot (which is part of the problem I won’t deal with here, mostly because it gets erased if and as we integrate the solution I say is blowin’ in the wind.)

THE CAPICITOR SOLUTION

I’ll say it short and sweet, because that’s what it is. Electric cars can happen now. Scientists have combined some previously-unrelated technologies (electric capacitors and batteries) and devised a means of making them …one. Electrical batteries and our use of them have blinded us to the potential of wind generators and electric cars…by making us reflexively think batteries (standard) have to be involved in both. As I’ve already explained in regard to making Duke’s supply grid a “sharing and storage” grid, I’m now saying, with authority, that batteries are no longer required, theoretically, in the process of supplying us with electric cars that can store enough electricity to travel 600 miles and be recharged in under 15 minutes…about only twice the time it takes to fill up with gas at the station.

Google “capacitors” and “cars” and you’ll be referred to the new cutting-edge  technicians who, with authority, tell us that, just around the corner they will have finalized a production model (already having a functional prototype) of a car, powered exclusively by an electrical motor (actually an array of them) which (motors) are powered by a “battery” that’s really not a battery, but rather a serialized tandem-sequenced array of electrical “capacitors”  which do what batteries do, but 100 times faster and more powerfully, and without lead or other toxic heavy metals, and without creating any toxic or volatile gases or waste products in the process.

Capacitors are the things in “stun guns” that permit a palm-sized electronic module to produce enough voltage in a millisecond to paralyze an elephant.  Putting enough of these capacitors in series in an all-electric automobile SOLVES THE AUTOMOBILE PART OF OUR GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM.  Electric cars emit zero carbon.

The combination of solutions blowing in the wind (literally) and developing  at the cutting edge of Capacitor technology will literally  solve all the world’s major problems…save, again, the perennial ones of too many people and too many politicians being puppeted by our oligarchial corporate polluters.

But, as when Dylan was singing his lamentations about the answers to the problems of war (in Viet Nam) blowin’ in the wind, I wonder as he still must about…

Problem number 4 (above)—-the real kicker.

What we clearly need is a group of leaders who can muster for our salvation a “Manhattan (type) Project” to make wind power and capacitor cars a reality before our environmentally-cataclysmic tipping time happens. NASSA’s James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute, says 10 years is our maximum time left to execute Kyoto protocols across the carbon-emitting boards.

 How to get the petro-chemical and power companies of our Country to indorse a planet-saving program which will end their reign of ecological terror and economic tyranny, will  at least be a feat of revolutionary proportions, if not literally a revolution.

IS ANYONE  OUT THERE LISTENING?

DON’T YOU AGREE IT’S ABOUT TIME FOR TEA?

WHO AMONG US WILL THROW THE PARTY?

WHO AMONG US WILL DARE ATTEND?

TECHNICAL REFERENCES:

For those interested in reading more and beginning research on the principles and costs of wind power technology, you can start with perhaps the world’s foremost pioneering  industry in the area on line at: http://www.bergey.com/

Then for the current “best value” in windmills, in terms of cost and functional efficiency, click here.

For the exciting new and promising enterprise incorporating capacitor technology to electric motor vehicles, start with:

 http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/07/electric.car.batteries.ap/