We Should See Other Blogs

Bear with me here, this is going to depend on widespread infrastructure and future technology.

Wind power isn’t a viable always-on solution because wind isn’t always on. Step outside your house right now: It might be windy, or it might not be windy. Even places like parts of Texas which have almost constant prevailing winds, the wind sometimes dies down. When it does, we burn coal to keep the lights on.

So in order to use wind power as an always-on power generation system, we’d need a remarkably large array of batteries to store power for when the wind dies down.

Of course, batteries are expensive. No-one wants to buy as many batteries as it would take to store the amount of power needed for, say, an entire day without wind.

What if there were an existing infrastructure solution to this problem, though? What if there were literally millions of batteries out there just waiting to get plugged into the grid?

Maybe there will be someday soon: Electric cars. They’re basically filled with batteries. Think about it: You drive your car for 15 minutes to and from work at times with low power usage (because people are driving to work instead of using power) and the rest of the time it sits in a parking lot or a driveway.

Instead of just sitting there, it could be plugged into the power grid all night powering up when demand is lowest. Then when demand is highest during daylight hours, it could feed back into the grid if the grid needed it.

We’d still need other generation facilities, yes, because wind might die down for two days and we’d be cursed with having no power and no cars to drive, but for most of the “wind is dying down for two hours”, the blips that are the real concern, electric cars would solve the problem admirably.

If one year we have zero tornadoes and the next year we have ten, there’s no trend there. There’s an anomaly. Next year we will most likely go back to having very few, if not none at all. You don’t get to make long-term predictions with a couple years of data.

Maybe natural disasters have been increasing in frequency and devastation. But let me advance another theory instead: natural disasters appear to be more frequent simply because of a massive, connected population. Any disaster is going to affect more people than any other time in history, but will also be instantaneously transmitted to the furthest reaches of the globe.

Sure, it looks like earth is becoming more violent; I don’t know if it is or not. I haven’t seen hard data, or any other type of data for that matter. But you know how it is: perception is more powerful that information anyways.