Fort Worth Real Estate

• 01Sep

  Solar Power in Terms of Land Use

  Uncategorized 1 Comment
  Following up to the Wind Power Land Consumption, here is an image which depicts total surface area needed worldwide to generate all of the earths needed electricity. (I lifted it off of Imgur, and don’t know who to give credit to.)

  

  Click For Full View

  This appears to be a relatively reasonable use of space. My concerns would be more in the demands for building materials. The strain that this would place on precious metals, and the almost unrealistic need for batteries. Solar power requires batteries, a technology which isn’t currently sufficient to mass electric delivery.

  Those batteries require precious metals and minerals, like lithium. There is a little considered issue in the world that could be called peak metal.

  Still, an interesting image.

• 31Aug

  Wind Power and Land Consumption

  Uncategorized 3 Comments
  I put together a spread sheet and made some rough calculations on how much land would be used if we were to gain our electricity solely through wind turbines. As you can see I ran one calculation estimating the land usage necessary to only power the residential properties (on 2001 electricity data), and a separate calculation estimating total land usage to supply ALL electric consumption in the United States.

  

  These numbers assume 40 acres are needed for one turbine. Estimates range up to about 50 acres per turbine, so my numbers may actually be conservative. Most people do not realize how spread out wind turbines are. There are roads and infrastructure that must go in to building a wind farm. As well, the base of each turbine is planted in a very large concrete pad. Transmission lines are also necessary for moving the electricity to a main power grid.

  I have also used a 1.5 mega Watt turbine as these seem to be the most commonly used turbine. Obviously, if 3 mW turbines were the only ones used we could bring efficiency up and negate half of the number of units and also halve the land being consumed.

  So, just to power all residential homes in the United States, we would necessitate lands roughly equal in size to Lousiana. To gain all US electricity through wind, we would use up about as much land as Montana holds.

  Here is another critical piece of information that most people don’t understand. When you transport electricity from a wind farm you lose quite a bit of it as it travels further down a transportation line. So there is a certain degree to which the electricity generated will be depleted before it ever reaches its destination. In some cases, this depletion can be as high as 50%. Because of this our necessary land sizes for power generation may reasonably be doubled. In such a case powering the entire United States from Wind Power alone could feasible consume enough land to fit inside of the entire state of Texas.

  Some methods of electricity generation can be extremely costly in terms of land amounts used.

• 28Aug

  New Pour House

  Uncategorized 1 Comment

  I notice that the Pour House’s new location on 7th St. is underway. Looks like it will be some time before it’s up and running though.

  The Blarney Stone (behind 7th Haven) should be on line soon as well.

  I am really starting to wonder at what point you simply have to many bars per square mile.

• 27Aug

  Rethinking Postal Routes.

  Uncategorized 6 Comments

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  I thought more about this post office issue, and I think that it is still easily resolvable. There are logistics that could be shifted so as to easily cut down Postal costs and keep things running smoothly. We must first realize that we have been trained our entire lives to expect that USPS is inherently a door to door service. In fact, this does not need to be the case.

  For drop off of smaller personal items of mail/letters, we should establish neighborhood level postal boxes. So a postal box that covers say two blocks could be placed at the end of every other block. This would tremendously cut down on driving and man hours. This is to say, no more home delivery. You and your neighbors can walk down the street.

  For pick up of items to be delivered we could simply establish deposit boxes near those same neighborhood level drop off boxes. Again both incoming and outgoing mail would be more central and the Post Office would realize a much better efficiency.

  Some Branch offices do provide other governmental functions, like the passport, but we would simply have to relegate those to district level. This really is no different than the state service, be it unemployment or drivers licenses.

  It just seems so simple to me. I do not see why the USPS is incapable of performing to scale. They are overbudget 7 Billion Dollars, perhaps it is time they start rethinking their route.

  

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