Word: solarity
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Long before last week's blackout, environmentalists and industry researchers had begun evaluating the idea of "power parks"--communities or mere groups of homes that would generate their own energy courtesy of solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells or natural-gas generators. The little clusters could be almost entirely self-sufficient, relying on the grid only in the event that they needed to top themselves off with a sip or two of outside power. Just as important, they would have the freedom to disconnect from the larger network entirely if a regional crash was threatening to knock them off-line...
...more than environmentalist daydreaming is that the necessary technologies have remained unreliable and prohibitively expensive (with the exception of wind turbines)--particularly if you are talking about microgenerators that serve only a single home. Lately, however, the question of cost, at least, is coming under control. "The price of solar cells has fallen," says Douglas. "Natural-gas microturbines are more affordable too. The economics are coming closer to reality...
Where economics lead, government policy often follows. The few consumers who do generate their own power--typically with green technologies like solar panels, windmills or hydroelectric turbines--usually use it only to supplement what they draw from the grid. Still, this can present a problem when the power they generate with their windmills or solar panels, combined with what they take from the local power plant, exceeds their needs. Historically, they would simply kick that extra juice back to the local power company, which would buy it back from them at far below market value. A new system has been...
Gerald Stanley Hawkins, a British-born astronomer who taught at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatories and first theorized that Stonehenge was created by Neolithic people to track solar and lunar movements, died May 26 at his farm in Virginia...
...solar is hardly the only alternative energy source that has failed to live up to the promises of its congressional supporters. Just as both parties have embraced President Bush's hydrogen initiative, they have also signed on to another of his long-shot proposals, one he says will provide "clean, safe, renewable and commercially available fusion energy by the middle of this century." Unlike nuclear fission, the splitting of uranium atoms that powers nuclear reactors, fusion joins hydrogen atoms to unleash far more energy. The trick is to control the fusion reaction to generate electricity. It has been an elusive...