Originally published in Green Home MegaStore in 2009

Hi there!

As usual, I was reading our RSS feeds (you should too, there’s some interesting stuff there) and this time I ran across an article that discussed the potential of having energy beamed to the Earth’s surface from high Earth orbits.

If you’ve been reading Practical Greenology and/or GHMS for a while, you will probably not be surprised at my reaction. I’m simply amazed! And that’s not because I never thought about it before. Let’s assume that the technical and financial hurdles are overcome, and we have a network of satellites beaming solar energy collected in space to us poor, energy-hungry beings here on the surface of Earth.

Do the logic: The Earth consumes – one way or another – the amount of energy that arrives on the Earth’s surface and radiates a sufficient amount back off the planet to keep us essentially balanced – albeit there are anomalies due to major volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, plus mankind’s atmospheric and oceanic pollution, etc. In any case, the amount of energy out-of-balance is not a significantly high amount. That’s the base case. For an energy-oriented engineer, that’s a balanced system, Energy In – Energy Out = No Change

Project – case one: We sit here and consume an additional 0,5% (a crass assumption, but we have to receive a large amount of energy to be able to pay for the space systems) compared to the solar energy normally landing on the planet. I don’t claim to have the foggiest idea of what the amount of heating rate that would amount to, but I am reasonably certain that it is considerably more than what is being caused by our pollutionary activities. I can imagine that in less than 100 years, the Earth would be totally unlivable for any creature species living here today! Talk about global warming! The engineer’s equation: Energy In – Energy Out = Change in Status Quo (we put in more energy – ultimately heat – than we remove, and start to cook)

Project – case two: We sit here and watch on TV as one of the radiation-gathering satellites goes haywire from a meteroid hit and the energy stream focus moves away from the receiving station and starts wandering around the countryside – destroying everything it comes near in a science fiction-type nightmare. Hmmm… there’s not really an engineer’s equation for this, but maybe FUBAR is an adequate description: Fouled Up Beyond All Recovery (that’s not the Army version :-) ).

Project – case three: More or less the same as case two, except that the deviation of the energy stream is caused by an attack from a political splinter group, either on the ground station (more likely) or on the satellite itself. Same results as case two, except that they may be able to choose their political or politico-economic target – Manhattan, Washington D.C., Paris, Damascus, Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul, you name it! FUBAR 2!

To be honest, I don’t like any of these scenarios. Do you?

Space Energy System Misused

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

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Power From Space?

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Hi everybody!

Time to blow our own horn a little – exactly 365 days ago, we published the first post on Green Home MegaStore, our first website! It was not a very exciting post, as you can imagine, but we’ve come a long way since then!

Thanks to Sue’s relentless backup – and of course her priceless prose as well – we’re well on the way up! Thanks!

We’re looking forward to the new changes that have just begun. By the way, I was looking and in the past 52 weeks, we’ve published 54 posts on GHMS! All original and unique, too, but not necessarily long. Some have been really analytical, and others just a joke that hit us as being funny on that day.

That was the third version of the website, but the first published on the greenhomemegastore.com domain, and the first published as a WordPress blog. Prior to that, there had been two html sites, the first one published as green02.tenuta.info (there were five total, green01 through green05) and the second one as greenhomemegastore.tenuta.info. Needless to say, those are now no longer in existence, not even as redirects. Not only did we change domains, we also started GHMS on a new hosting service that had a one-click WordPress installation (the original hosting we still have still does not have that on our server!). We just are slowly moving sites off the old server and will eventually close out the (today, expensive) account.

We are still with the original theme that we started with, “Outdoorsy”, and I have to say that I still really like it. We just recently upgraded to the latest version of the theme, and are working with a few wrinkles that still need to be ironed out.

We hope that you all will stay tuned here on Practical Greenology – because here is where most of the future posts will be, and we will probably move most of the existing posts on GHMS to this site as well.

Ciao for now,

Craig for Sue & Craig Websites

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Happy Birthday To Us!

]]> http://practical-greenology.com/about-the-site/happy-birthday-to-us/feed/ 0 http://practical-greenology.com/about-the-site/more-new-year-changes/ http://practical-greenology.com/about-the-site/more-new-year-changes/#comments Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:26:44 +0000 Jimmy Craig http://practical-greenology.com/?p=301 Continue reading →]]> More New Year Changes!

Hi again!

We (that’s Sue and I) have been doing some brainstorming about what we can do to improve our selection so that you get the best from us that we can deliver, and get it efficiently as well. What we have come up with now is to move all the posts – past, present, and future – from Green Home MegaStore into the Practical Greenology site (this one) and put the Green Home MegaStore back to it’s original purpose: a Green Home Store for your use and enjoyment. It will also put Practical Greenology back where it belongs, as a first-class discussion forum for new and obscure environmental things that might otherwise go unnoticed. There may still be a few posts on GHMS, but the majority of the posts will be here – at Practical Greenology – in the future.

We will also clean up the stores and make the entire process more enjoyable for you while you’re shopping. In the somewhat more distant future, we hope to install our own products for sale in the store, in addition to the things we have from other places. We will try to keep the system as simple as possible for this as well, since there’s no reason to make anything more complicated than absolutely necessary!

Remember this theme?

By the way, did you know you can get to Practical Greenology two ways? Yes, it’s true. both http://practical-greenology.com and http://practicalgreenology.com end up at the same place. Handy in case you can’t remember whether there’s a hyphen in the name or not. ;-)

It will take us some time to get all the changes made, but we think you will enjoy having everything centralised in the future. The themes on the two sites will remain the same, except we’re trying to keep up with the changes to Suffusion (the new theme for Practical Greenology) that seem to be coming fast and furious!

Ciao for now,

Craig for Sue & Craig Websites

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More New Year Changes!