Antarctic Glaciers Melting Faster Than Thought!

A Look At The Antarctic

• Antarctica is a continent about 1 ½ times bigger than the United States and is surrounded by water.
• It is Earth’s Southernmost landmass, overlying the South Pole.
• About 90% of the ice on Earth is located in Antarctica. These are large, thick ice sheets that normally move at Glacial speeds
• Sea Ice Surrounding Antarctica roughly doubles the continent’s size during its winter.
• The highest peak on the continent is the Vinson Massif at 16,077 feet which is about 600 miles from the South Pole.
• Temperatures at the South Pole reach 140 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
• Antarctica has penguins but no polar bears...and scientific research centers from nations all over the world.
• Together, all of the Glaciers in West Antarctica are loosing 114 billion tons of ice per year because of the rapid melting reported…this is much greater then the new snow fall that would replace it.
• It is also more than equivalent to the current mass loss from the whole of the Greenland Ice Sheet!

The oceans are getting bluer...due to a loss of Oxygen rich plankton, and deeper due to the Polar meltdown... we have little time to reverse this effect.

How big is a WATT? or...more important...a MegaWatt?

The United States has achieved a 25Megawatt of wind generated power...but what does that mean?

Is that a day...an hour...a week or month...even a year? Well when we talk about power generation we are talking about an hourly output, So when we say that we generate 25-Megawatts we mean that we have an average hourly output of that level ... averaged over the year...which accounts for high and low speed revolutions on the wind generators.

Now with that aside...what is a Watt? Simply stated in basic electrical terms a Watt is the energy needed to do work...and it is the result of Volts generated multiplied by the current flow reported in Amphere hours (or amps). If we are generating 25-Megawatts we have 113636.36 Amps at 220 average volts.

Well, we are getting closer...but is there a visual we can create? Yes...lets talk light bulbs...say 100 Watt incandescent light bulbs... if you have 25,000,000 watts and we devide it by 100 we would find out just howmany bulbs we could illuminate with this power source...

So 25000000/100 equals 250000 light bulbs glowing brightly...

Electricity consumption by 107 million U.S. households in 2001 totaled 1,140 billion kWh so you can see that 25Megawatts is not that powerful a source...

At 25GW+ we are number one wind generator, but...

The United States passed Germany in 2008, becoming the world’s number one in wind power installations, according to a report by the Global Wind Energy Council, while global wind capacity rose 28.8%.

“The 120 GW of global wind capacity in place at the end of 2008 will produce 260 TWh and save 158 million tons of CO2 every year,” said Steve Sawyer, Secretary General of the GWEC.

Wind power installations in the U.S. added 8.4GW of capacity, bringing the country’s total to 25GW, passing Germany, which previously held the record at just under 24GW, said the GWEC.
25GW is more than enough power to keep the lights on in five million houses.

The Global Wind Energy Council is forum for the wind energy industry.

This increased capacity came before President Obama, who has promised to boost renewable energy production, even stepped foot in the White House.

The report also notes that the wind projects finished last year, added 35,000 new jobs to the U.S. economy. This brings the national total to 85,000 in that industry.

So...is being number one important enough, or do we need to do more? First off, wind is a meaningful source of energy...but it has mechanical issues that result in lost power in both low wind and high wind...too slow or too high to manage the torque on the systems. These issues need to be overcome using engineering and materials that will provide longlife turbines.

If 25GW produces the energy for 5 million homes then our goal should be closer to 2500GW...and the power for entire regions. Next step...making it happen!