Letter: Observations on energy stories (March 10)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Put your editorial of March 3 together with the environment article of March 2, “State may ban companies from using ocean as coolant,” and the real dilemma becomes clear.
Let me critique your editorial to clear up a minor area of disagreement.
Electronics today use amazingly little power. When I was young, it took 120 watts just to light the filaments in an “All American Five,” the simplest of radios. Televisions had a bunch of vacuum tubes, including the CRT, and used a lot of power. The days of vacuum tubes are gone. The CRT has now been replaced by the LCD. (Don’t buy plasma, it uses too much power.) Projection TVs still use CRTs, but, in large sizes, the economics still favor projection. Circuits are now digital instead of analog. The junctions are either on, dissipating only the current through the drop of the junction, or off, dissipating no power.
I agree completely with your remarks on battery-powered devices, including cars. The charging and use cycle of battery systems is poor. My best guess is 50 percent utilization of the energy in. Put this together with 40 percent, at best, efficiency of a fossil-fuel power plant and transmission losses, and the picture of plug-in cars isn’t so rosy. But, the emissions are at the power plant, not in my community.
Rechargeable battery-powered devices in general are very wasteful of energy, but, very handy and time-saving.
The article of March 2 shows one of the many ways the profit motive is being hit with punitive measures. If the owners of power plants are banned from using sea water for cooling they will install cooling towers or cease operating. A cooling tower can only lower the water temperature to within about 10 degrees F of the wet bulb temperature of the air entering to tower. In summer, the cooling water will certainly be warmer than sea water. This will reduce plant efficiency and reduce power output.
Cooling towers must use fresh water so they increase fresh water use, require the use of chemicals to control biota and corrosion, require cooling tower blow-down to control solids accumulation (water is evaporated in the cooling process), and require the disposal of water containing high solids and treatment chemicals. I’d rather keep power plants operating as designed and avoid a huge disposal problem.
We needed more power plants long ago. Two nuclear power plants in the south San Joaquin were needed when the pumping of water over the Tehachapis south to the LA Basin and east to the Mohave thence to San Bernardino began. A pumping lift of over 1,000 feet at the volumes involved requires enormous power.
I think that the current situation with the California Aqueduct and the Delta Mendota Canal is influenced by power availability during summer. This is one of several problems not being discussed.
Bob Christiansen,
Madera
