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It's so stupid of me in my dotage to be interested in the energy crisis. More than likely I won't be around when these technologies come to fruition, or the Earth dies in the effort. I'm reading about how some inventors are trying to build battery-like storage devices to hook up to windmills and solar panels so that the electricity they produced can be stored locally and used as needed.
Presently, the only practical way to handle the generated electricity is to sell it to the grid, and pay the difference in how much power you draw from the grid. If you use more than you produce you pay them. If you produce more than you use, they pay you. You can wax ambitious to make a profit or kick back happy to pay less. If you got the cash it's a good deal either way.
My personal interest is in each household individually producing at least it's own requirements, with a surplus for the grid, if at all. Wireless power would be aesthetically pleasing to say the least. There is a guy down the road who re-wired the house he grew up in to run off 12 volts like a motor home does. I believe if everybody did that it would really help use less power to begin with.
This is an interesting article on how to save the electricity windmills and solar farms generate:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20011751-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
One interesting method mentioned in this article that I haven't thought of would be to use the electricity generated in real time to pump water up to elevated tank, and then when you need it back to run a household it would be opened up to descend upon a turbine generator that would switcho-chango the energy back into electricity to cook with.
The home refrigerator could have it's own outlet from the elevated tank with it's own small turbine that produced exactly what is needed, and only when the compressor runs. If I had a windfall I could have a waterfall to play with. What fun!
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
