Is geothermal our only hope?

nuclear - waste, but can be very safely stored, but people still see this waste as dangerous, and there isn't an unlimited supply of uranium.

wind - great, but can kill birds

solar - is not efficient enough in alot of parts of the country

hydro - disrupts ecosystem

It seems like none of these can work.
thoughts?

 

Sadly no one form of renewable's will be the true answer...

I do believe that to supply a nations energy feasibility studies etc have shown that Nuclear is (and sadly) the best answer.

Currently where I live (Shetland Isles) there are plans for a fricken mahoosive wind farm..
And to even make it financially viable the turbines are twice the size of standard ones, a cable must be laid from Shetland to Mainland Uk..
Its insane. The amount of co2 that will be released during the construction process us unbelievable. Remember folks... Peat is a storer of CO2!!
Then there is the massive infastructure involved.. Thousands upon thousand of tonnes of Concrete! An Inter connecter etc etc.

Also.. visually.... shadow flicker, noise...
Don't get me started on Bird Kills...

Within Shetland and the organisation that we work for we are currently working on a bio fuels project.
Currently in the planning and testing scale but the plan is to grow willow and other grass crops to be grown and cut (short rotation coppice) and then chipped and used in wood burning stoves (they are highly efficient.)
These schemes would be used within small communities to provide heating, (within the town we have a large district heating scheme where water is heated through the process of incinerating landfill waste)

Also most of the community halls have a wind turbine to provide electricity and to heat water..
Our green house and horticultural unit and showers will be heated by electricity produced from a small wind turbine.

I fear I am rambling..

It will be interesting to see what other people think.

Cheers

Mabs

 

solar is good when it works - i suppose itd be far more useful in more rural areas, places that dont have a gas supply or something

hydro, again a good plan, but the ecosystem is far more valuable. i think theres a place in wales that produces looooads of elec by hydro, its a good scheme, but it (like solar) would only work in certain places

im very much against windfarms.. ugly, noisy, generally bad. horrible things.

geothermal is a very good plan, but as with everything, theres the initial set up cost, and maintenance thereafter. also, some places cant have this system simply due to where they are on the planet. some places are far from hotspots so itd be impractical. i think all of icelands power/heat is produced by geothermal, but its a very geologically active place so for that situation, its the perfect solution


for everyone/thing/where else, i think the best bet would be a combination of sources. theres no way that one source would be enough for the whole of the british isles. its always an interesting topic this, because everyone gets divided and has their faves

iggy:

 

The price for solar is still too high, but it's dropping fast. I'm a big fan of solar shingles for houses. Then you wouldn't have to take up land building big power plants with powerlines stretching for miles.

 

Iceland - Europe's largest exported of banana's. =]

Solar is great for supplying hot water to homes. I'm hoping to have an aero generator and solar panels in my first house.
A heat exchange unit in the ground is also a fantastic thing to have..

 

They just put Fort Monmouth, NJ on Geothermal. Neighbor worked it. Driving tubes deep into the earth, pumping water through them then back up to the plant. It heats the plant and offices.

The capital cost and payback period are high, but it is The US goverment spending the $$$$

 

Not yet, in the next few years Iceland plans on becoming 100% renewable, but not just yet. They are using a mix of geothermal and hydro.

There is an option not yet discussed here: Marine Current Turbines.
Due to the sheer power of tidal flows, the rotational speed of the blades will be low, but the torque (turning power) will be massive. This means that by gearing a massive amount of power can be generated whilst keeping the blases slow and relatively easy to avoid, meaning sea life is at much lower risk than birds around a wind farm. Additionally sound carries mush more readily in water than air, so it would be impossible to imagine the mechanical noise wont be audible to marine life for a few hundred metres around and act as a sort of beacon.

The UK at least is very wealthy in terms of tidal flows, in fact we can boast more than a quarter of Europe's fastest flows. With just a relatively small utilisation of these flows these devices can generate 25% of the UK's energy needs, but in reality that is much higher. Imagine putting thousands in the straits of gibraltar. The tidal power there is truly awesome. Put bigger ones further out to sea and take advantage of strong currents that flow all the time, rather than in, out, in, out with a pause between each. You can mix them with offshore wind farms, put a turbine on top and you're getting another generator without needing to make new foundations.

http://cleantechnica.com/2008/12/18/seagen-shatters-tidal-power-generation-record/

 

im against the idea of the proposed Severn Tidal Barrage, because itll destroy the mud flats that the wading birds use, but i havent really read up on that for a while now (had to do a project on it at school 5 years ago..)

and the bit i mentioned about iceland was mentioned to me by a friend whos been there,, so apologies for being wrong, but i was nearly there =]

 

Exactly. No need to block off huge areas of wetlands and such (that are getting rarer and rarer anyway, when we can perfectly easily extract huge ammounts of energy from the water without blocking and trapping it. Wave generators are also coming into their own now, I believe the new one being tested in the shetlands is proving an enormous success story.