Geothermal

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Economy; Category: Energy; Published: 26 December 2010; Hits: 81412

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Geothermal power is competitive with coal and less expensive than wind when the resource is very near to the surface; for example in the ‘pacific rim of fire’ countries. Many plants already exist around the world in volcanic areas. Unlike wind or solar geothermal power is continuous and ‘base load’. But the easily exploited resource is geographically limited and its contribution to total energy consumed worldwide is negligible compared to that of hydro and wind.

Deep geothermal is more widely distributed and is being explored in several locations in Australia but at the present time substantial technical issues have not been fully resolved and the capital cost of extraction is likely to be very high (leading to a high carbon footprint and very high cost per kWh).

Nevertheless it is hoped that geothermal power could compliment wind or solar as the REC value climbs and/or an ETS comes into effect.

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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

South Korea

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website. Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited. This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen. It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The McKie Family

Introduction

This is the story of the McKie family down a path through the gardens of the past that led to where I'm standing. Other paths converged and merged as the McKies met and wed and bred. Where possible I've glimpsed backwards up those paths as far as records would allow.

The setting is Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England and my path winds through a time when the gardens there flowered with exotic blooms and their seeds and nectar changed the entire world. This was the blossoming of the late industrial and early scientific revolution and it flowered most brilliantly in Newcastle.

I've been to trace a couple of lines of ancestry back six generations to around the turn of the 19th century. Six generations ago, around the turn of the century, lived sixty-four individuals who each contributed a little less 1.6% of their genome to me, half of them on my mother's side and half on my father's. Yet I can't name half a dozen of them. But I do know one was called McKie. So, this is about his descendants; and the path they took; and some things a few of them contributed to Newcastle's fortunes; and who they met on the way.

In six generations, unless there is duplication due to copulating cousins, we all have 126 ancestors. Over half of mine remain obscure to me but I know the majority had one thing in common, they lived in or around Newcastle upon Tyne. Thus, they contributed to the prosperity, fertility and skill of that blossoming town during the century and a half when the garden there was at its most fecund. So, it's also a tale of one city.

My mother's family is the subject of a separate article on this website.

Opinions and Philosophy

Australia's carbon tax

Well, the Gillard government has done it; they have announced the long awaited price on carbon. But this time it's not the highly compromised CPRS previously announced by Kevin Rudd.

Accusations of lying and broken promises aside, the problem of using a tax rather than the earlier proposed cap-and-trade mechanism is devising a means by which the revenue raised will be returned to stimulate investment in new non-carbon based energy.

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