Re: light switch tax


try this out: take your handy dandy Coleman PowerMate emergency
generator that you keep handy and gassed up because you are smart
enough to know that we are in seriously deep *** and you want to be
ready for emergencies (but I digress). Fire that baby up and let it
warm up a bit. It will idle down to minimum engine speed with no
load. Now plug in your electric drill, and give that trigger a blast.
What happens? The voltage regulator senses the increased power draw
because the voltage will drop. Within a half second or so the voltage
regulator will throttle up your engine so the generator will spin
faster and generate more current in order to maintain the set voltage
level.

The very critical and blatantly obvious thing that you are not getting
is that your handy dandy Coleman PowerMate generator is NOT your power
company. They operate in two entirely different ways. Your generator
is connected directly to your home, and is designed to operate at a
minimal level and then increase power based on demand.

Your power company generates electricity based on what it determines
will be PEAK demand for it's entire area of coverage. And when the
amount of demand in your area is less than peak (and by definition, it
almost always is) your power company is STILL spinning it's turbines
to generate that same amount of power. It takes slightly less fuel to
maintain that level of power, but the difference is not nearly what
you believe it to be.

The REASON your power company works that way is that it takes an
absolutely enourmous amount of energy to increase production. Your
handy dandy Coleman is one little engine; it can throttle up output in
a matter of a second. Your power company has a line of turbines that
weight around four tons each. It literally takes *hours* to increase
output. If demand exceeds peak, the result is going to be a brownout
or a blackout because it is literally IMPOSSIBLE to throttle up demand
instantaneously.

I realize that when you wrote this little rant you were probably
grinning like an idiot, rocking back and forth, and drooling over the
reel smurt thang you done jus' come ep wiff. But as is so often the
case when you post, the smarter you think you're being, the dumber you
actually are.

You can drill all the holes you want and the generator's
voltage regulator will maintain the current necessary by running the
engine to the necessary level to maintain your level. Now get this:
as soon as you turn off your drill, guess what happens? The voltage
regulator senses the drop in current draw and immediately backs off
your throttle on your engine to slow your generator because you don't
need it turning so fast. Now, true, the generator has some momentum
from the spinning mass of our rotors, (what you call spinning reserve
probably), and that may continue to generate some power that is not
needed, but the point is your power input system, gas engine, coal
fired steam turbine, nat gas or whatever, can sense the drop in
current load and back down the energy input to your engines therefore
saving energy. Or are you claiming a multi-million dollar megawatt
power generation station doesn't have the same technology as a 900
dollar Coleman generator?

It has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with
basic physics; in this case, inertia and material strength. The
turbines at your typical power plant have blades over ten meters long,
and that weight in at around four tons each. The inertia is
absolutely incredible; it takes enourmous amounts of energy to get
those blades turning, and to make any change to that spin.

Because of the forces involved, the turbines are designed to spin at a
constant rate; when you have that much mass spinning that fast and
with the heat that goes with it, the stresses involved with slowing
and accelerating even by a few percent would quickly result in
critical failure.

It takes upwards of tweleve hours to get a turbine spinning to
operational speed. Any faster than that, and you risk microfractures
which would lead to catastophic failure. It takes somewhere around
nine hours to let a turbine spin down for the same reason; the inertia
is that great, and any attempt to slow it would also risk catastrophic
failure.

When demand is less than peak (and again, by definition it almost
always is ) the amount of energy (fuel) needed to maintain that
constant operational speed is slightly reduced. Very slightly. This
isn't your handy dandy Coleman we're talking about. In the space of
an hour, it is unlikely to even be noticable.

They shunting it all to ground? No, it stays in the lines (minus circuit loss), and the
generators don't have to work so hard because there is not as much
load on the system.

It takes slightly less fuel for the generators to maintain their speed
when the draw is reduced, but they are still maintaining that speed.
The point is, the difference in fuel consumption (and thus CO2
emissions) is via turning off lights for an hour is negligible; and is
in fact mostly offset by the sudden *increase* in draw at the end of
the hour, when all those lights come back online. The point being,
the change is minuscule in both directions; and the net even more so.

guess we can add Ohm's Law to the greatly increasing list of things
you don't know jack *** about.

Actually, we can add it to the list of things YOU don't know jack ***
about, because if you did you wouldn't have tried to apply it here.
You only appear more stupid when you try to apply terms that you don't
understand. I realize that in your case, that ends up being just
about all terms imaginable; you'll just have to work around that.

Again - and take as long as you need to read this part - the issue at
hand is the amount of fuel being used to spin the turbines. The whole
point of Earth Hour is supposedly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
and the reality is it does absolutely nothing towards that end because
the turbines do not stop spinning.

Once again you are trying to bull*** your way through a discussion
that is frankly above your abilities. Your little Coleman attempt was
cute in a way, but the cuteness was overshadowed by the sheer
stupidity of the notion that supplying power to one house is
operationally equivalent to supplying power to thousands or millions
of different consumers with widely ranging levels of consumption.
.