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On Monday 28 May 2007 00:06, Adrian Midgley wrote: > Simon Waters wrote: > > As such I think a "carbon neutral" data centre wants to be located > > somewhere with a plentiful supply of (reliable) green electricity, and I > > think Devon is out, unless they build the Severn tidal barrier. > > Hinckley Point doesn't generate carbon dioxide... But the money spent building one nuclear power station can be used to insulate saving hundreds of times the energy ever generated by that power station. However insulation is not a monopoly thing so .... I studied Nuclear Power at university - theres no way to make these things safe at a reasonable cost. You cant use them for 'filling in' and not make them susceptible to meltdown in a terrorist attack. So they're not a lot of use. > > > I doubt > > Wind farms will hack it, although I guess if it were big enough, and > > sold electricity to the grid when it had surplus.... > > They need a pumped storage system to give continuity so a decent > mountain - I suspect Dartmoor of not being high/steep enough or easy > enough to dig vast caverns into. Electrolysing water into hydrogen (and oxygen) for reuse in power cells has already attained 70% plus efficiency so wind power can be used to generate power and the surplus stored - but again the monopoly thing and the resulting government opinion comes in. > > The Severn thing is a good idea, I'd prefer the lagoons rather than the > world's biggest barrier straight across. Why a barrage or lagoons - which will be subsumed in 10-20 yearswith small sea level rise- having wiped out a vast amount of wildlife by destroying habitats. Why not use vertical 'windmill blades' on a conveyor belt to extract power from the tidal flow? There are a lot of simple partial solutions but only those that preserve the huge earning power of monopolies or cartels get the paid for ear of government! I was a microchip-designer some moons ago and we did some power chip work that would have made inverters for about £5 per KVA for the silicon. A controller for these would be about £100 and then by law you need a transformer to connect to the mains and thats ~ £150 per KVA. So why are they so expensive -£1500 p KVA? Patents and monopolies! Sound familiar? Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html