carbon nanotube springs

Originally posted by Andrew Hamilton
.... and is called “run-off-the-river” hydroelectric (you can Google this).

I did, and had not realized that we were talking about large power stations. I had assumed we were talking about waterwheels and suchlike.

I come from Livingstone which is right next to the Victoria falls which has a “run-off-the-river” hydroelectric power plant.

But; unfortunately, its really big disadvantage is that it doesn’t store potential energy. Now if only we can find an economic alternative way to store that energy that is as good but cheaper than using dams, that could be a huge potential improvement to hydroelectric in the future.
The Wikipedia page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-of-the-river_hydroelectricity
suggests that the storage advantage of a dam has to do with storing energy seasonally, not daily.
Thus if you were to use some form of battery technology or nanospring, you would need a vast amount of storage capacity. A whole dams worth.

At the energy density of lithium batteries, what sort of volume would we be talking about? If we were to put the potential energy of all the usable water in the Kariba Dam into electricity and store it in batteries, we would be talking about millions or billions of car batteries.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I did, and had not realized that we were talking about large power stations. I had assumed we were talking about waterwheels and suchlike.

I come from Livingstone which is right next to the Victoria falls which has a “run-off-the-river” hydroelectric power plant.

But; unfortunately, its really big disadvantage is that it doesn’t store potenti ...[text shortened]... city and store it in batteries, we would be talking about millions or billions of car batteries.

I think if you can at least store all that energy collected over, say, a 30 hour period, that would be a significant help as it would help to smooth-out the supply with demand a bit.
Mind you, you could do that using a relatively small water storage facility using no massive dams.
-So, Point taken.

I am convinced that modern technology should allow us to better manage our usage. Many devices could be set to automatically adjust their power usage according to current conditions. If the power company transmitted the current load on the system to our meters, then devices such as geysers, fridges, freezers etc could manage their power usage so as minimize usage when the grid is over taxed.
Potentially this could nearly halve overall electrical generation requirement as power companies have to generate power up to the maximum expected load and generally waste half the generated electricity due to the daily fluctuation in demand.

Originally posted by joneschr
This guy generates 300 watts and he's 55 years old. Definitely not insignificant.

If you switch off your PC before going to the gym, you would save more power, than if you left it on, then used a bicycle generator at the gym.