some person wrote a letter to the editor in a papper her today.

she said that solar and wind energies are more effiecent then fossil fuels, namely petrol.

i always thought petrol was very efficeint.

input wisdom below this line
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the way you spell efficient isn't very efficient...

Once you have an established solar/wind farm, then thats going to be a lot more efficient than constantly runnng around digging up dirt. Sorry to be crude;)

lol @ EvisceratoR

rofl Jojo :) nice joke heh

and yeah of course a wind farm or solar dooby is more efficient than fossil fuels as it isn't burning anything

petrol is more efficient.

more efficient than petrol, EH? I'd like to see figures to back that up.

OK
Internal combustion engine (petrol) is about 25% efficient.
Diesels can get to above 30% especially in the larger motors. Detroit diesels can be a high as 35%.
External combustion engines (say coal fired steam power stations) are as high as 80%+.
Now once installed wind power is, well for all intensive purposes 100% coz all you need to do is maintain the hardware. But there 00.00000% efficient if there aint no wind and thats the facts.

what figures do you need? wind and radiation are renewable and free sources of energy... thus they are efficient, as they don't "waste" anything, whereas fossil fuel combustion does.

exactly goauld

I wouldve thought that goaulds answer sumed it up... Commen senese > fact ;)

Yeah what Goauldmember said. Although sustainability and efficiency are prolly different concepts, they interlap in the way you said.

I think the deal on solar/wind is and always has been 'long term'. A delay in financial tenability, long term efficiency, and a sustainable economy.

Did anybody see the Sunday Mail article with that protoype Sustainable Suburb theyre bulding near the bay. About time this was taken seriously; maybe we are the smart state if that works out.

Well, define efficiency. Say fuel is 25% efficient - I interpret that to mean 25% of its mass is converted to energy. Compare that to how much wind you'd need to generate that much electricity via a turbine, or how much sunlight. Surely you'd need heaps, heaps, heaps more wind/sunlight to generate the same amount of power, which would make it less efficent, right?

well by definition it is the ratio of the energy delivered by a machine to the energy supplied for its operation. So what you're saying isn't the right kind of efficiency at all. It means how efficient the power is over the method used. I know building a wind farm would use alot less resources than burning fuels.

Well, define efficiency.

Hard to compare since fuel, radiation, and wind fall in three different categories of physics. You base your efficiency judgement on the chemical mass of the petrol, but wind and sunlight don't have this property. In the long run it would probably be cheaper to have a huge solar panel rigged up on your car (like satellites have) than to keep digging holes in the ground and refining black gold.

"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is not novel. We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic.? If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic - and this we know it is, for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."

- Nikola Tesla, 1891

Wow I thought sigs were necessarily obscure and irrelevant. Good work goauldmember!

Jojo, that sig is a punishment :D

A load of windmills won't get you from Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast ... any reasonable car with $10 of petrol will.
A solar panel won't get a field plowed. If a whole new infrastructure needs to be created to support renewable energy, then it isn't as efficient. People rate time as the most valuable resource of them all & that is where the waste is incurred by solar or wind generated energy.

People rate time as the most valuable resource of them all & that is where the waste is incurred by solar or wind generated energy.

that's a very short-sighted view of things

No i meant how

it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."
- Nikola Tesla, 1891

used to be goauld's sig line. Unless you meant that too, in which case I'm confused. See this isn't efficient. Renewable energy is.

that's a very short-sighted view of things

hahaha! denny craqd a funneh!

See this isn't efficient. Renewable energy is.

what is "this" ?

Goauld: My neurological activity or deficiency thereof.

also teen got his current sig because he evolved an extra chromosone

I know building a wind farm would use alot less resources than burning fuels.

I don't think efficiency is how many resources something uses - its a measure of how effectively it turns whatever INPUT it has into OUTPUT.

I don't think efficiency is how many resources something uses - its a measure of how effectively it turns whatever INPUT it has into OUTPUT.

so you're talking about the efficiency of combustion engines, windmills, and solar panel circuits, not of gasoline, wind, and sunlight...

kerosene has one of the highest calorific values, higher then gasoline.

thats why gas-turbine (jet) engines are run on it, to extract most power out of a fuel, make more thrust etc. and btw, gas turbines are now 37-40% efficient.

btw kdlang is ugly

yeah trog, at the moment, with current solar technology, they don't transform 100% of input into output, it's like 10% i think, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner, and it's renewable, so i think most people agree, it's more efficient for that quality alone.

so don't think energy throughput efficiency, think renewability efficiency

Everyone is arguing with a different definition of efficiency. In this context it can't simply mean energy efficiency, because the "real" energy sources are completely unrelated. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about the efficiency of solar radiation vs petrol. To talk efficiency you need to talk processes.. eg PV cell vs internal combustion.

Solar/wind makes sense under certain circumstances for certain power requirements. As it stands, we have no real way to extract, store and utilise enough solar power (solar power includes direct radiation, wind etc) to even come close to meeting our current requirements.

Efficient or not, its still better.

trog is f***ing on the ball.

if we were to get solar and wind energy, what is the oint if we can't use it in every day things. fine we could use it for power at home but in cars there is at the moment no way they output would be efficient enough for our needs.

I think they are saying that compaired to the waste products solar and wind power is much more effecient than petrol engines.

Wind power only has the continuation of said wind.

Hybrid systems, that get the best from all the worlds are highly effiecnt are they not?


Also wouldnt the size of the power producing facility also contribute? Like a coal power station takes up so much land, while wind power takes up heaps more land to get the same power output..

Nothing can be totally efficient. A heat pump needs a heat sink to work at all and for it to reach %100 needs a heat sink at zero degrees kelvin and thats cold (plus impossible but scientist get close). A wind mill can only extract a certain amount of energy but with trogs comment it can be said that it is most efficient because it only produces a little waste heat but only extracts about %10 of the enrgy in the wind (just put up a few and there's so much energy in wind it don't matter much (how many KJ in a lightning bolt?). Another natural source of enrgy is tidal generaters using the moon to produce electricity via the movement of the oceans. There is almost unfathomable amount of energy in the rotation of a mass like the moon. It would take a few D12 bulldozers to stop em He He.

What is the question. Energy efficiency or environmental efficiency?

yeah I saw a Toyota Hybrid at UQ, it had stickers all over it explaining how efficient it was... all the riceboys were checking it out - but I think they were more impressed with the stickers themselves than what was written on them.