OT: Why don't we cover mountains in wind farms?

What bullshit did I tell you?

All power sources need building and need land. But the biggest cost of running say a gas fired power station must be the gas. Imagine if your car used no petrol.

Years ago I wondered if the heat captured by solar panels couldn't be utilized with the side effect of keeping them cooler, for example, a combination of PV panel and solar water heater. Some active solar water heater systems are colocated with a PV panel to drive the pump and controller but that's as far as it goes.

I never pursued the thought because it seemed obvious enough that it would have been tried and failed.

Trouble is that solar water heaters need to be very hot to produce hot wafer.

Not tried and failed, just realised that it couldn't work.

It does seem strange. The Mojave and Sonoran deserts are a bit toasty this time of year. Ajo AZ was 103 today and is predicted to hit 107 tomorrow. That's not a short term fluke either:

But don't cool a hybrid evacuated tube collector/PV coated tube inside.

They do blend in better than turbines. The place with the air gun rifle range sounds interesting.

The few racetracks around here have shut down, and building new ones is out of a question. The last was an outlaw kart track. Public interest may have a lot to do with it. The local tastes run more to abusing livestock (rodeo). That's been described as the third dumbest thing in the world riding the second dumbest while chasing the dumbest or sometimes the third dumbest trying to ride either of the other two.

I miss it. Where I grew up you could literally go to a stock car race every day of the week and twice on Sundays all short dirt tracks none of that fancy NASCAR stuff.

Do you know how efficient the Californian solar farms are?

What we need is photovoltaics that can utilise infrared too. We can emit it with stuff, so why can't we absorb it?

Probably not but you have to understand the dynamics. The top of the pass is the San Joaquin valley. Left to its own devices it would be a desert but it is heavily irrigated. Anyway it's a basin that heats rapidly as the sun hits it. Hot air rises, nature abhors a vacuum, and Livermore is down on the bay.

That's typical of deserts. Barring weather cells most of the wind is caused by localized heating. The sun goes down, the temperature drops radically, and the winds cease.

This state is 147,000 square miles with a total population hovering about 1 million. Since you need water to survive the population centers, as they are, tend to be along the rivers. This side of the state is mountainous so the highways also tend to follow the rivers.

In other words there a thousands of square miles with very few people and the coyotes don't carry cellphones. It's gotten better with linked towers along the major highways. Even in town there are areas with no coverage. Sometimes I'll play Jango through the car radio and it's a good indicator of coverage. When the music stops...

I'm not far from town but luckily I do have usable 4G because that's my internet connection. There aren't enough people for cable and the telephone lines are lucky to handle voice. Anyone that wants TV has a sat dish.

Overall the US lags a lot of countries. The local wireless store has posters advertising 5G but even they know it's a joke. It took long enough to get to reliable 4G.

Okay Brandon...

Caves? Sounds good. I've been reading 'News From Nowhere', written by William Morris in 1890. It's sort of an anarchist utopia set in a future Britain where everyone has adapted to a simpler life style. The narrator is a time traveler of sorts although that isn't too clear. He asks his guide about the Houses of Parliament which are still standing. The guide replies they've kept some things like that around to remind them how ugly things were in the old days and it's current use is to store manure.

Someone more familiar with Britain's geography would get more of the references but it's safe to say Morris didn't care for the way things were going.

The planes filled with Yankee dollars stopped coming; q.v. cargo cults.

Or Geißen... or Böcke depending on how the beat identifies. At least the genders are what one would expect unlike some German nouns.

It's a bit difficult to land an aircraft there these days - a few jet and rocket engines travel the distance each year.

Efficient isn't the right question, economically feasible is.

Then there is UV. Visible light was the low hanging fruit.

I want to live there, then high winds wouldn't wake me up.