Energy (Part II)

So today’s lecture was a workshop on 4 different cases. My group’s case was about providing electricity for a couple of wells being dug and perhaps providing some excess electricity for the community. The wells were to be planned and dug by the authorities and our only concern was the energy production. The area in question was desert like and close to the equator.

I do not wish to diminish the importance of the other cases in any way but I will use this space to spin further on our idea as I found it quite interesting.

Our idea was to build a water tower next to the well and of course use a pump to get the water up there. On top of the water tower we placed solar panels and wind turbines to produce the energy needed for the pump and the pump would run non-stop during the day and thus eliminate the need for batteries (with low life-expectancy) as the energy would be stored in the displacement of the water mass. On the way down the water would pass through a turbine and thus we would get energy for the community. This is about as far as we got concerning the technology of our case, we did however think about the socioeconomic issues as well.

So to further the idea I would like to say that I found this idea intriguing since it would be possible to build it in components and ship it from wherever and put together on site like LEGO bricks. This could keep costs down and would mimic some projects of the UN. This is the basic idea; modular and easy to ship in its components (like IKEA furniture).

So on to specify the energy component of this idea. Being that the water tower would have to be quite high (we need to have a certain drop to get “any” energy out of the turbine) it would be rather vise to use the height to its full potential. This means that a wind turbine would be optimal to place on top since it would reach the stronger winds higher up. Since they cannot be placed too tightly together the space in between could be utilized by placing solar panels. Furthermore, we could use the temperature difference between the outer air and the inside of the water tower to gain more energy with small Stirling engines placed all over the surface.

I haven’t done the math on this but I believe we would get sufficient energy out of the solar panels, Stirling engines and wind turbines to power the pump and then some. To add to that we would still get energy from the water turbine.

This would basically be a self-sufficient system that can be dropped in place anywhere around the equator. Adding to it a small water treatment plant we would have clean water, electricity distribution (in some way) of both. Then we could do another system with wastewater treatment and fermentation and some biogas power plant, basically a “all the utilities you need” in a box.

So as the lecturer said (do not remember the exact words); most the technical problems can be solved by engineers, however, the socioeconomic problems are another issue.