Robert Hayes reports that, currently, burning fossil fuels is the main source of energy here and around the world. Those fuels emitting greenhouse gasses are considered by most associated scientific organizations in the world as contributing to a potential global catastrophe in the making. With this, we are critically dependent on electricity for almost every necessity we have in our standard of living. A very important concept in electricity production is the term baseload. This term is often used when concluding the need for nuclear energy to be in the mix of clean electricity sources for modern society.
Baseload electricity is simply the minimum total electricity used throughout the year at any given time and region. This means that all sources combined, the baseload amount of electricity needs to be supplied continually as the very minimum. At different times of the year and throughout each day, only more electricity than that baseload minimum will be needed. So more capacity is required to meet the day to day variations in peaks and lulls from society demands on the electrical energy grid. Familiar renewable energy sources such as wind and solar panels are not able to contribute to baseload energy needs without some form of energy storage. Without reliable storage capabilities having low conversion loss, these solar based sources would not be able to start contributing to the baseload. This would be based on average solar availability although industrial scale storage systems do not currently exist, some are in development and do show promise.
Another common difficulty with wind and solar panel energy sources is the large area typically required to be committed for the energy generation capabilities. This means that to a first approximation, the energy which can be generated from 100,000 acres of land devoted to wind turbines and solar panels could be generated by a fossil or nuclear power plant on only 100 acres of land. Read on....
See Original URL: http://www.science20.com/cool_science/environmentally_friendly_electricity_production_nuclear_and_hydroelectric-155642
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