Brian's Morning Newsletter

Tuesday, September 7th 2010

 
Good Morning

Well, first off the block I want to share a website http://ludens.cl/paradise/paradise.html that for me molded wonderful dreams. Nell on the other hand, had paranoid nightmares, but now she is all better, peacefully wandering the virtual Chilean landscape, before she has to leave for work over to the hospital and her lovely new job as she moves up the the company ladder.

Alrighty then, you may wonder what my connection is to this or just how I found this beautiful website. Well Austin's camp party is over and as soon as I see some facsimile of recovery for poor old Kevin, I hope to employ his brains, and multitude of other mad-skills to fix up our wind turbine.

I've also got two other major irons in the fire here, one being a hydraulic clutch issue on Bobby's Ford, which I am already well dug in on, but will shortly require some Brianization. Currently the truck is sitting in the driveway with a load of oak on the back, the drivers side door hanging open exposing an utter lack of a rudder. I had a heck of a time yesterday morning, removing the top nut from the clutch master cylinder, so I pulled the whole steering column.

Ahead for the kid, is a quick and dirty engineering of a firewall plate to stabilize the master cylinder, righting it in the process, so that the lid can be removed, the fluid level checked, without the use of a crowbar. Anyhow, that ain't nutin, and I can do this modifcation in my sleep, unfortunately, asleep is what it is like talking to the customer, but this seems to be what is has come down to with me: I love working the machines, but the owners are way more difficult to deal with.

It sounds like I am making excuses for why the clutch did not work the first time, except I explained all this already, but nobody listens to me. We get "shut up and fix it," a lot. No wonder I don't like people that much huh?

Climate Change and extreme weather forecasters are right in there with me I'm sure. Instead of listening to the scientist and implementing slow easy modification to our behavior we accuse them of trying to trick us. Meanwhile the situation gets worse likened to a snowball rolling down a hill. I mean what is it, 80-90% of humans are too busy to think about what we are doing to the environment? The other 10 to 20% are left arguing semantics. Who is working on the problem? Well this is what I am trying to find out, who is working toward fixing the planet and what are they working on?

Yeah sometimes I feel hopeless and helpless. I can get dark in the process. Meanwhile endless debates continue. In fact it turns out that the only thing more inevitable in the life than higher taxes would appear to be more expensive wars. The debate of windmill footprint continues: Adam and I spoke at Austin's camp party. I feel better, I thought maybe I had alienated everyone over there in the Bernal – Pecos valley with my reversal on the wind farm, I'm now for them, and learning a great deal about  what people's fear and anxiety over mega wind farms are in my process.

People will feel the way they feel. At least they are people not some faceless corporation.  I want to listen, but I feel we are under the gun to get renewable energy going. Anyway, Adam was telling me that studies show it could cost million dollars per mile to bring power to the turbine farm. It  is disgusting how much money it costs to do anything anymore. I'm not just thinking of the scale issue with mega wind farms either. Everything has ridiculously high price tags.

http://cursor.org/stories/dronesyndrome.htm A little digging uncovered that a drone costs a lot, I mean a friggin shitload of money

Table 1. Drones  in Afghan Theater, 2001-2002

So why be surprised that some corporation can blow a million dollars every mile stringing wires. Oh boy lookie at the date of this data, 15 million ten years ago, why that price must be tripled by now. No doubt it is way the hell and gone of the scale, but that doesn't stop America from ordering Drones by the boatload. A million dollars per mile, hmm, a thinking sort of a person might wonder what $1,000,000.00 laid out over a mile looks like.

I can tell you that had the oil and gas industry needed a pipeline and it costs 2 million dollars per mile, it would already be built. What does this do to all of our arguments for or against? It seems to me that the renewable energy industry which is not in the same league as the fossil fuel industry hasn't got the cash to help us believe what they want us to believe, leaving us to argue, over carbon footprints of wind mills and low frequency hums.

Hydroelectric dams got built, salmon spawns were obstructed, engineers did something about the issue once it was discovered. I don't think it is the big deal people are making of it. Contractors do know how to build stuff in watersheds without tearing the heck out of the place.

Like I said, I was going to try and explain how I wound up in Chili last night.  Let me see…
Oh yeah, Kevin and I were discussing how to deal with the low wattage from our wind turbine after doubling the size of the battery bank. We need more data to look at this scientifically, quite frankly living and working in the great country such as America has become we have no budget to be scientific. We can't buy a $50 anemometer so we can measure wind speed to compare to RPM of the turbine, thereby determining TPR (tip speed ratio)

I suggested we determine best-guess blade design. We know it is simple to raise and lower our turbine, less easy is unbolting the blade set, but not insurmountable. I'm wanting to use the biodiesel Dodge to make a run to Santa Fe for a load of Western Red Cedar to laminate for some experimental turbine blades.

That is one way to look at the problem, another might be to build a controller. Reading, yeah doing a lot of reading, and there are some people out there doing open source projects who would like the help to develop a controller capable of easing the work load mostly this is PV but it should work for wind turbines as well.

So briefly as I can I will show you what people are working on that got me interested in charge controllers. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/charge-controller/

This is very basic circuitry, with a lot of tedious programming and debugging. The point is: this is what it takes to make something happen, do it, share what you have, try to get other peer minded scientist-types to become involved and more a technology out of the hands of the corporations and to the people

Right, I still have not even picked up the basic kit so I could work along with the originator of the group. He is working alone, while the rest of us are looking over his shoulder, questioning the use of this or that, not having one finger in the project.

I need to see what people, creative resourceful people like myself can do if I weren't stuck under the dash board for people who don't care what we do only that we do it by a certain time.

So first it was here: www.madlabs.info  < silly mad science stuff of mine
Cool cool stuff, mostly educational, not exactly what I was looking for,  then someone on the charge controller forum kicked this site up: 

http://ludens.cl/paradise/paradise.html

Here I'll toss you a bone, just in case you think I'm going off all technical again

Yep, they got there own volcano

Don't worry, this guy is going to build a microhydro electric system for his home below the above pictured volcano, and yes, it is going to be right up there as one of the best photographic tours I have ever been on

 These are real muscles derived from manual labor

Ditto

Wheelbarrows, horses, shovels, jungles, my god I could not tear myself away.  

 The actual hydro turbine, from my background and understanding this guy build a lot of this stuff himself.

Pictures of him sitting in his new cabin winding copper to create the transformers that push the voltage up from the Chinese generator output of 230volt 50 cycle per second up to 1000 volts to reduce voltage drop on the electricity's  journey back up to the house. I mean, damn, that is absolutely gorgeous, even better than the hundreds of photos of the beautiful Chilean countryside, right?
 

–
Brian Rodgers

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