Saturday, April 16, 2005

The Coolest Comment to my Blog Posts so far!!!

I thought this was the coolest comment to any of my posts so far. The comment comes from an "Anonymous Reader" and in response to my post titled "My Idea for a source of Energy" . S/he has an alias name of "ask me about it" and I thought I wouldn't be doing it enough justice if I didn't post the comment as a separate blog. So, here it is:

Ask me about it. said...

Energy can be classified into two types.. energy that can be "stored/transmitted/used else where" and energy that can be "used where it is produced". For the stored/transmitted/ used else where type of energy a good source is justified based on three aspects... reliability, cost and environmental impact. It might be interesting to note that environmental impact and reliability rank as the best parameters besides cost (although reliability and environmental impact can also contribute to costs as maintainance and remediation issues) in comparing the various energy sources. So unless you have a gym where bikes are running non-stop(with bonded labour from some asian / african nation i presume....) this is not a viable option for reliability purposes (assuming energy is transmitted for use as it is generated). For purposes of storing energy and then using it elsewhere the accepted method is converting mechanical energy to electrical energy and storing this in chemical storage devices or electrical storage devices (devices like flywheel type energy storage where inertial energy is stored are also available). For storing in these type of devices the obvious problem is storing enough energy before you can remove the storage device and use it else where... if you generate very small amounts (like those that you would generate during ur two hour work out) the losses are significant as compared to the generated energy. Again you would need a dedicated workforce to generate enough storage energy. (a good question to ask would be where do we see people exerting energy solely for the sake of spending it.. like they do in a gym) To talk of the obvious, dynamo installed on the cycles (remember HERO cycles??) is an application of "use where you produce" type of energy. Hope I didnt bore you.. nice blog though.

3:42 PM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whats new? Orphaned this blog?

Anil said...

Thanks for stopping by, been swamped with work... lately... will be back soon :-)