[mdlug] Router - now power.

[Robert Adkins]

> 
> You could do what they do in the electrical engineering 
> building at Purdue... the incoming AC drives a 3-phase 
> electric motor, which drives an AC generator....with a very 
> large flywheel in the mix.
> 
> These keeps the high voltage lab (10,000 V) from getting 
> spikes which would easily go over 1 MV due to the transformer 
> step-ups.
> 
> With good bearings, this is quiet enough that I never 
> suspected such a thing until I actually saw it in the basement.
> 
> The only thing needed are some big knife-switches on the 
> house (load) [side that are kept in place by presence of 
> current], so that if the power goes out, you can spin up the 
> flywheel before the generator (and hence the
> motor) sees the load from the refrigerator and other heavy motors.
> 
> Might not be cheap initially, but the output is perfectly 
> sinusoidal, and the equipment lifetime is measured in decades 
> or longer -- especially if you use brushless motors and 
> generators (i.e. magnets are in the rotors, not the housing [stator]).
> 

	Sounds like quite a project. Interesting, but I don't know if that
is something that I would really need for a home that is slightly over 1400
square feet.

> > actually blows through my neighborhood, I'm considering installing 
> > some of those micro wind turbines that are made out in the 
> Grand Rapids area.
> > 
> 
> Good luck on recouping your cost on that.
> 
> The European experience with wind generation of electricity 
> is that material and maintenance costs exceeded the 
> electricity produced.
> 

	If that's really the case, then why is anyone bothering to produce
any wind power generating equipment.

	There's plenty of different methods for generating wind power and
one of the prevailing setups has been utilizing a shedload of precision
gears and drive shafts to transfer the wind down to the ground level
generator. Which, as I understand it, causes a significant loss of potential
energy generation.

	Some newer thoughts on ths matter is to eliminate all the gears and
shafts and have the turbine blades directly spin the generator. As I recall,
the energy difference is very significant, the only issue with that design
is that any maintenance would need to be done at the top of the tower. That
sort of maintenance could likely be alleviated with better construction and
perhaps some automated low power monitoring and simple self-lubricating
systems.

	There's other designs that look like pieces of art and are able to
generate power via even the lightest of breezes. They are virtical "fans"
that spin around a shaft and are able to generate electricity regardless of
the direction that they spin.

	Nifty stuff is out there and while some/much of it is still rather
expensive, economy of scale is more than willing to bring those costs down.

	-Rob