Repair (Heal) Your World

I wrote this when I heard that the new South African Nuclear Power Station has been put on hold: (written 10/12/2008) The cost of the stopped nuclear power station was going to be R100 Billion (R100,000,000,000) and for this amount we could take more than 200,000 houses completely off the grid, paid for by the government and with minimal running costs and almost zero decommissioning costs. This at R500,000 per house (*1) The R100 Billion nuclear plant would have produced 3,400 MW. So the cost is R29 per watt. The biggest wind turbines are 6MW. This would need 567 wind turbines plus a factor of 20% for wind free days = 681 turbines. Large Wind Turbines cost in 2002 was R20 per watt (*6) which means that a 6MW turbine costs R120m Rand. Multiplied by 681 = R80,720,000,000 (R80 billion). Meaning we have money left over if compared with R100 for a Nuclear Power Station. This R19.3 Billion could possibly be used to add more wind turbines giving us a spare capacity of close to 50...

Let's get around to looking at some calculations. I suggest that you sit down with a piece of paper and a pen so that you can work through this example with me. The problem: During a 4 hour Eskom power failure, you want to run your computer for 4 hours and it uses 300 Watts (per hour); you also want to run 4 lights for 4 hours. Each light draws 8 Watts. You don't want to use a noisy, smelly and pollution generating generator. You want to build a system yourself and one day add a solar panel or solar array to it. You are prepared to spend a bit extra to make that "start" in Renewable Energy. Renewable Energy "Thinking" Notes: Eskom energy is still much cheaper than generator energy, so we'll start with charging the battery using Eskom energy. Eskom energy isn't clean, but we need a starting point. We can add solar and other technologies to this system later. My Eskom energy (electricity) at the moment is about 70 cents per kwh. This in May 20...

Dear All Believe it or not we live in a communistic (note that I define Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, differently to other people) World. It might not be "Communist" in the original sense, ie where a small group of people own everything, but today in our western world, a relatively small group owns everything. This is called centralisation and is supposed to be good and efficient. But is it? Most of us are slaves with "no free time" in a centralised world with centralised farms providing food to centralised organisations withcentralised warehouses. The centralised warehouses send their produce to centralised supermarkets and shopping centres. We get into our transport bought from centralised manufacturers and pay for fuel from centralised oil companies. We maintain our transport (cars) by using centralised (in many cases) maintenance organisations. Once we get our food, we refrigerate it and store it and pay centralised utilities for our electricity....