 - Last login: 13 hours agoLaodan
- laodan is a 56 year old guy from Wisconsin, USA.
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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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How Africas desert sun can bring Europe power | Science | The Observer
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Dec 1, 2007 6:03pm
4 reviews
economics, alternative-energy, energy, sustainability
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/02/renewableenergy.solarpower?...
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How Africa's desert sun can bring Europe power
 in The Guardian by Robin McKie
Europe is considering plans to spend more than 35bn dollars on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East.
More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations, including Britain.
Billions of watts of power could be generated this way, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.
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Europe would provide initial funds for developing the solar technology that will be needed to run plants as well as money for constructing prototype stations. After that, banks and financial institutions, as well as national governments, would take over the construction programme, which could cost more than 400 bn dollars over the next 30 years.
 How Africa's desert sun can bring Europe power
Desertec, as this project between Europe and North-Africa is called, is based on a technology dubbed 'concentrating solar power'. Things are staring to move in the right direction and hope is thus on the way.
But before such projects materialize in supplied electricity it will take a decade or two. So in the meanwhile the energetic problem of humanity will persist. In short the demand for oil and gas is growing faster than its supply and prices are shooting up. This shows us that the world will soon enter into a period of scarcity and the intensity of the problem will thus be multiplied:
- peak oil means that half of all the oil in the ground has been pumped in the past. It was the cheapest oil to pump and costs will now increase drastically. But peak oil also means that the total oil supplied is going to decrease annually by a percentage of 2 to 7%.
- the oil producing countries are on an oil consumption binge that is leading to less and less oil available for export.
The next 2 decades will thus be extremely difficult for all of us in terms of our energetic bills.
My personal take is that we should start by reducing our needs for energy in our homes through insulation and the use of passive solar and geo-thermal techniques to reduce the quantity of energy we need.
Our transportation needs could be solved by a combination of increased public transportation choices and our private use of vehicles running from non-fossil power sources: compressed air, auto-generation of hydrogen,etc...
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