06 September 2007

7.3 - Happy dippy bird power

So I sit here watching my happy dippy bird do his thing, while pondering Global Intelligence and the energy choices of the coming decades.

Chevron has developed a nifty game that lets you determine the energy sources for a city through 2030, and enables you to see the impact of your choices. If you want to do well, you choose some combination of hydroelectric, wind, solar, nuclear, and hydrogen. If you want to do poorly, try to run everything on petroleum and coal.

I'd like to think that by 2030, we would find some method of generating power that no one has thought of yet.

I'd like to be that someone.

The idea of powering the future with multitudes of drinking bird toys is interesting, but some quick calculations indicate that it would take about 1 square mile of head-to-tail, side-by-side birds (that's about 300 million birds) to power three 100-watt lightbulbs—and that doesn't even account for keeping their heads wet. Apparently they are tremendously inefficient. So... although the idea has some definite visual appeal (Spencer Tunick, eat your heart out), I don't think that will work.

Maybe you only need one bird. One really big bird...

4 comments:

Catherine Wannabe said...

I thought you were supposed to be working on outdoor projects, not creating a new energy source! Perhaps the dippy birds can power you up a bit...renewable "man-power" would be REALLY benefical to society! :>)

Catherine Wannabe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Icon-1 said...

That post was verry funny. Thanks for the good laugh. Although, I find Cathy's comment quite harsh.

Catherine Wannabe said...

Not meant to be harsh at all!!! Sorry, sometimes my humor falls flat.