Should Renewable Energy be Necessarily Stored?

The question if Renewable Energy should be stored or not is an important one. The Technology about Energy Storage Systems is improving day by day but the costs are still high. So it's important to understand if there are different ways to use Renewable Energy since is the Energy of future.

At the moment one can think about Renewable Energy generation that since the global quota produced is small compared to the global quota of Energy produced it would be convenient to use it at the same moment when Renewable Energy is produced.

This could be true if the Global net we know with the name grid would so simple to understand as to switch a button. Unfortunately it is not!

What seems so straightforward on our end –turn on the lights and bam, electricity! – is truly a complex system designed to move huge amounts of power staggering distances, all so that we can exercise our right to run the washing machine, dishwasher, and power drill all at the same time.

When you plug your smartphone into the wall outlet, you’re tapping into the grid. “The power grid is like a massive pool,” says Charles Barnhart, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project. “There are lots of hoses pouring in, and lots of taps pouring out.” The hoses pouring in come from power generators, including everything from coal to nuclear to hydroelectric to wind to solar sources. The taps pouring out are our smoothie blenders, refrigerators, stereos – and that dead phone battery of yours.

 Here’s one key thing to know about the grid: It doesn’t function unless energy demand (from us) and energy supply (from power plants) balance out. Too much demand, and we lose power. Too much supply, and we also lose power, as the aging grid can’t handle much surplus energy. Grid operators prevent this by carefully monitoring and predicting energy demand (for example, they often expect a surge in demand on hot days when we all crank up our air conditioners), then calling on power producers to deliver that precise amount.

The problem with the ever-fickle wind and sun is that they’re not so easy to predict and control.

Overall, energy from renewable sources does make up a decent slice of the country’s total power – about 13 percent. But the grid is constantly fluctuating, and at any given (sunny, windy) time and place, renewables might be humming hard enough to overwhelm our demand for energy (as it did during this Pacific Northwest storm, or on most nights in Texas).

All right, you might say. I get it – but when wind and solar are pumping, shouldn’t we dial back all the grid’s dirty power sources and let renewables shine? I’ll let Paul Denholm, Senior Energy Analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, handle this: “You can only turn a power plant down so much. A Prius comes to a stop at a red light and the engine shuts off. When the light turns green, the engine starts up again. Power plants aren’t like that – if you turn it off, you have to keep it off for hours. Also, it’s really expensive to turn a power plant on and off. “It would be great if in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining, we could turn power plants off.

But the sun will set, and you wouldn’t have the plants back on again in time.” And so we’re left with a situation where we use renewable energy when the demand is high enough. When the wind is blowing/ sun is shining but we don’t need the energy, however, we can either curtailwind/solar production or figure out a decent way to store the excess.

That’s why renewable energy storage is a bright idea today, not years in the future. There’s lots of exciting science being done in this department, from high-tech batteries to pressurized air stored in volcanic rocks to hydropower reservoirs to residential water heaters. This is all part of the Smart Grid, a broad collection of ideas aimed at modernizing our creaky power system and integrating renewables more seamlessly. Some day, we may wash our hands of our dirty power sources.

Cassini Probes Finds Plastic on Titan

The NASA Cassini spacecraft has found propylene, a chemical used in the boxes that store food and other consumer products, on Titan, one of Saturn's moons (the largest). This is the first identification of plastic on a Moon or a Planet outside the Earth. The small amount of propylene has been identified in the lower atmosphere of Titan by the instrument CIRS (Composite Infrared Spectrometer), an infrared ray instrument that can measure the heat emitted by Saturn and its Moons.

Gravity Streaming Full Movie

Gravity is an upcoming Film directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Strictly speaking it's the story of a medical engineer and an astronaut work together to survive after an accident leaves them adrift in space.

The Actor Stars are Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. 

The Film is a masterpiece of 3D effects to recreate the light of the Earth and Sun on an astronaut and the weightlessness of zero gravity.

Gravity is no ordinary sci-fi flight of fantasy every single frame and movement had to be planned out before filming started to merge the CGI and live action seamlessly. Visual effects coordinator Tim Webber’s team referenced thousands of NASA photographs of the space shuttle and International Space Station down to every last nut and bolt.

Video. Gravity Film Trailer

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Page localizations. Beware to Duplicate Content and Google Penalizations

Several Companies offer the same Service or Product in different cities. The page content would be very similar for each city and could appear as duplicated in most cases. Duplicate content is not a Google best practice and some penalizations could appear reducing the whole website traffic.  So how to best practice and avoid Google penalization?

Tesla Motors the Best Electric Cars - 500 Km with 2€

Which is the best Electric Car? At the moment the answer to this question is very easy! Tesla Motor produces the best electric Cars under different point of view. Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition to electric mobility with a full range of increasingly affordable electric cars. California-based Tesla designs and manufactures EVs, as well as EV powertrain components for partners such as Toyota and Daimler.

First of all the TESLA full charge Autonomy

Tesla cars can run for 500 Km and recharge in 20min for 100 Km more! This is a record that makes Tesla Motors cars the most useful electric cars ever.

Tesla cars design

The Tesla motors design is stunning. The interior design as well as the exteriors. Have a look to this Video.

Tesla Cars Safety

Despite its lightweight metal body, the Tesla Model S electric vehicle earned the highest automobile safety rating in North America. Here are all the test and a Video showing Safety of the Tesla Car Models.

Life on Mars

Is there Life on Mars? Some new Curiosity pictures seems to confirm that perhaps life was present on Mars year Ago!
How do you can explain the Lizard walking on the Martian soil?
Or the Brontosaurus stuck in the Martian soil?
And what about the Mars rat.
All the pic in the Gallery are credited by Nasa and appear in the official archive of the photos taken by Curiosity on the Martian soil.
It could be an optical illusion but who knows. Maybe Mars was populated log time ago from strange creatures.

There is comprehensive evidence for life on Mars if you know where and how to look for it. It seems one can find everything from animals to fossils, bones, skulls and even carved or manufactured objects. They can be found in some of the images beamed down from the Mars Rover Curiosity. Unfortunately NASA seem to be over compressing most of the images that are free to download from their website but some of the large panoramic TIF files are of good quality and are at 200 DPI. (Dots per inch)

These are the ones to go for. The animals in the main are dead and look freeze dried in Gale Crater. Mummified in the extreme cold nights that in go down to about minus 60 but the days are hot. Up to 70 degrees or more. There are very conflicting views about the temperatures on Mars mainly caused by people using averages witch are quite misleading. As for the air on Mars we are told that there is only 0.5% oxygen. Personally I think more like 5% in some areas unless the surviving creatures have adapted to breath Co2 or Hydrogen. This may explain why most of the living creatures found so far are small rodents and reptiles. They can survive on very low quality air and can burrow to avoid freezing.

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I don't know if life or Mars was present or not. The same question is posed by David Bowie song below:

Video. David Bowie Life on Mars

 

Gobekli Tepe: The temple that should not exist

Gobekli Tepe (trad: round hill - navel) is an archaeological site located about 18 km north-east
from the city of Şanlıurfa in modern Turkey, near to the Syria border, in which was found the oldest example of a stone temple, dating back to 9600 BC and that is undermining all the standard believes about the origins of Human civilization.

Göbekli Tepe is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge but it was built much earlier and not with blocks of stone roughly cutted but with limestone pillars finely sculpted in bas-relief. They are still visible parade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, wild boar!

The Complex dates back to seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza, and it is the oldest known example of monumental architecture. Around 8000 BC the site was abandoned deliberately and voluntarily buried with earth brought by man.

Archaeologists continue to dig and discuss its meaning. Göbekli Tepe and other sites in the Middle East are changing our ideas about a turning point in human history: the Neolithic Revolution, when hunter-gatherers were transformed into sedentary farmers.

The site is located on an artificial hill about 15 meters high with a diameter of about 300 m, situated on the highest point of elevation of a elongated shape which dominates the surrounding region, between the Taurus Mountains and the Karaca Dag and valley where the city of Harran. The site used by man would have had an extension from 300 to 500 square meters.

So far, less than a tenth of the site has been excavated. This gives an idea of ​​the awe inspired in the temple to the pilgrims who gathered here 7,000 years before the construction of Stonehenge.

The Gobekli Tepe discovery

Gobekli Tepe was first identified in 1963 by a turkish-American research group. They noticed several piles consisting of fragments of flint, a sign of human activity in the Stone Age. The site was later rediscovered thirty years later by a local pastor, he noticed some odd shaped stones protruding from the ground.

The news came to the head of the museum of the city of Şanlıurfa, who contacted the ministry, who in turn got in touch with the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul headquarters.

The excavations were begun in 1995 by a joint cooperation between the Museum of Şanlıurfa and the German Archaeological Institute under the direction of Klaus Schmidt. The latter was working in the previous year some archaeological sites in the region. In 2006 the excavations went to German universities of Heidelberg and Karlsruhe.

The excavations brought to light a monumental megalithic sanctuary, consisting of an artificial hill bordered by stone walls rough dry. They were also found four circular enclosures, bordered by huge limestone pillars weighing over 10 tons each, probably plucked with the use of stone tools. According to the Director of the archeological site, the stones pricked up and arranged in a circle symbolize an assembly of men.

The more interesting discovery concerns about 40 stones disposed to form a T high as five feet. The limestone blocks, weighing five tons, were brought here from a nearby quarry even if the wheel or domesticated beasts of burden were not yet introduced.

Most of them are engraved and they show the different types of animals (snakes, ducks, cranes, bulls, foxes, lions, boars, cows, scorpions, ants). Some recordings were voluntarily canceled, perhaps to prepare the stone to receive new ones. There are also decorative elements such as patterns of dots and geometric patterns.

Geomagnetic surveys have indicated the presence of other stones, almost 250 still buried in the ground. Another T-shape stone, extracted only half the quarry, was found about 1 km far from the site. It has a length of about 9 m and was probably intended for the sanctuary but from some reason was abandoned.

There are also some isolated sculptures, in clay, very ruined by time, which probably represent a boar or a fox. Comparisons can be made with statues of the same type found in the sites of Nevali choirs and Nahal Hemar.

The sculptors had to do their work directly on the plateau of the sanctuary, where they were also found stones unfinished and bowl-shaped cavity in the rock clay, a technique already used during the Epipaleolithic to get clay for sculptures or the clay binder used in the masonry.

In the rock there are also phallic representations, maybe go back to later periods, finding comparisons in Sumerian and Mesopotamian cultures (sites of Byblos, Nemrik, Helwan and Aswad).

Until now, 45 of these stones have been dug, but there are indications that there is much to discover. Geomagnetic surveys imply that there are hundreds more standing stones, just waiting to be brought to light. Gobekli Tepe would have been an extraordinary site. A kind of Turkish Stonehenge.

Several factors make of Gobekli Tepe archeology an isolated and unique case.
The first is its age. Radiocarbon dating shows that the complex is at least 12,000 years ago, perhaps even 13,000 years old.

This means that it was built around 10,000 BC. Gobekli Tepe is thus the oldest complex site constructed by Man in the world. It is so old that it precede the time when it is believed Man become sedentary. Gobekli comes from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, deep past of hunter-gatherers.

How did cavemen build something so ambitious? The archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, thinks that bands of hunters would have gathered sporadically at the site, during the decades of construction, they lived in tents made of animal skin and kill the local game for food. The many flint arrowheads found around Gobekli support this thesis, but also support the dating of the site.

This revelation, that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could have built something like Gobekli, radically changes our view of the world, because it shows that the life of the ancient hunter-gatherers in this region of Turkey, was far more advanced than we ever conceived. It is as if Gods came down from heaven  and Gobekli had been built with their own hands.

Gobekli Tepe as a Constellation representation

The particular arrangement of the complex of Gobekli Tepe is also the arrangement of the main stars of the constellation of the Pleiades (also known as the Seven Sisters, called by the ancient Romans Vergilie) that count different stars visible at naked eye in the constellation of Taurus.

A few years ago, archaeologists found at Cayonu a pile of human skulls. They were found under a slab altar, dyed with human blood. No one is sure, but this may be the first evidence of human sacrifice: one of the most inexplicable human behavior, which could have developed only in the face of a terrible societal stress.

Experts are debating the evidence of Cayonu. But what no one denies is that human sacrifice took place in this region, including Palestine, Israel and Canaan. Archaeological evidence indicates that the victims were killed in huge death pits, children were buried alive in jars, others were burned in large jars of bronze.

These are almost incomprehensible acts, unless you think that the people had learned to have fear of Gods, because they had been driven out of paradise. So he tried to propitiate the wrath of heaven. This savagery may, indeed, be the key to a final solution, baffling mystery. The amazing stone friezes of Gobekli Tepe are preserved intact for a bizarre reason.

Long ago, the site was deliberately and systematically buried with a colossal work together with all its wonderful stone carvings. Around 8000 BC, the creators of Gobekli buried their realization and their glorious temple under thousands of tons of earth, creating the artificial hills on which the Kurdish shepherd walked in 1994. The reason that led the ancients to bury forever the temple of Gobekli Tepe remains a mystery.