admin answers:

Yes. They oppose drilling anywhere in America. They oppose construction of new refineries in America (none have been built for over 30 years.) They oppose construction of any new nuclear power plants. They oppose mining shale oil. They oppose mining coal and refining it into petroleum products. They even oppose any R & D for the futuristic proposal to build solar power satellites in Earth orbit, beam the energy down via microwaves, and feed the energy into the electric grid.

It is very, very clear that they APPROVE of high gas prices. Lieberman’s latest proposal would raise them even higher. It is even more clear from all of the above that they want to destroy the American economy, because they are wrongly convinced that America is destroying “the planet.”

So, by all means, blame liberals and environmentalists for ever increasing energy prices. They’re getting exactly what they want.

admin answers:

You are way out of your depth if your report for science class is supposed to be knowledgable.

First of all, Solar panels alone will NOT be enough to charge the battery bank, which you don’t even mention in your quesiton.

Secondly, the only way to have a usable 12 VDC system is to use a wind generator to keep the batteries charged to capacity and, as a plus, they will work at night.

A 65 Watt ARCO Solar Panel is about $300 and you need to figure your power by the Wattage Rading for the particular panels .

You also need to add in the cost of a 12VDC to 110VAC invertor, monitoring panels etc…. AND… Just how big is the ROOF of the house you are planning to use.?

This is an area of involved study and it’s a bit more than what you are imagining for your high school science class report.

admin answers:

The solar storms that cause concern in operating the power grid is due to the long transmission lines traversing ground with different impedance along the route of the line. Thus the geomagnetic ground currents induced in the earth which result from a solar storm, move from the earth onto the power grid. These currents are very low frequency between 0 and 4 cycles per second. These currents flow through the power companies transformers and may force them into magnetic saturation and cause voltage distortion and harmonics to show up on the grid.

If the geomagnetic ground currents flow through the power company’s generators, a similar set of problems will occur. If you are talking about a home generator that is isolated from the grid, then no this type of generator will not be affected simply because it does not span a long enough portion of the earth to be affected. As for batteries, it is not likely that any battery system would typically be hooked up in a configuration spanning a great enough distance to see these ground currents either. It would depend on how and what they were hooked up to.

I hope this helps,

Newton1Law

admin answers:

When I was a kid, I sometimes heard rapid clicking noises coming from my television when small planes were flying nearby. It turns out that there is a solenoid on certain kinds of engines that give a pulse that can interfere with radios and whatnot.

I bet you have a neighbor running a generator or there is some other source of such interference outside of your home (but not too far away.)

The person causing the problem may not even be aware that he is interfering with your radios.