Welcome.
This blog, Greengineering will be focused on applying engineering
calculations on so-called green solutions to environmental problems
that are much in the news. Hence the name, a conflation between
“green” and “engineering”. I am inspired to attempt this
because I have read many newspaper and internet articles about new
technologies that will solve pressing environmental problems, but
these solutions are put forth as panaceas: if only we would adopt
solar power, electric vehicles, wind power, or any other of a number
of new technologies, all our problems would be solved.
Not so fast.
Every technology comes with its own set of trade-offs, and anyone
who has been around the high tech world long enough is familiar with
the concept of “unintended consequences”. But trade-offs and
consequences are often not well discussed by the various political
pressure groups advocating the solution de jour. I
intend to take a look at the trade-offs and consequences by using
first order engineering calculations to attempt to determine the practicality of
adopting certain technologies. Which technologies? Here are just a
few questions that spring to mind:
- How much more electricity
would be required if all automobiles in California were switched
electrics?
- How much land area would be
required to replace the entire electric generating capacity of the
United States to solar power?
- Can pumping water into
reservoirs for hydro-electric power generation generate enough power
to supply California during hours of darkness?
- How many nuclear power
plants would be required to supply all electricity in California?
These, and many other questions,
as they occur to me will be subjects of this blog, and my posts will
be the calculations I make to come to a first order understanding of
feasibility and trade-offs of the problem. Initial conditions will
be made, as much as is possible, with publicly available statistics
and my calculations will be the heart of each post. I invite any
reader who disagrees, or can add to the discussion to add their own
calculations to advance the common understanding of the issues
involved in each post.
What makes me qualified to write
this blog? I hold a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering
from the University of California, Davis. I have worked in Silicon
Valley as a software and test engineer for ten years, and own my own
cabling contracting business. Calculation describing physical
sciences are not new to me, and the ones I will be writing are not in
any way complex. Simply asking the question and computing a few
first order numbers can be very enlightening.
Now, a note about units: I will
be using SI units throughout this blog. Only initial conditions, and
final answers, will be expressed in U.S. Customary units for the
benefit of non-technical users. I have decided to do this mostly
because I want this blog to appeal to international reader, and
partly because the software will be using to make my calculations,
SMath Studio, defaults to
SI units. A clone of
the old MathCAD,
SMath Studio is a open source program that makes engineering and
scientific computation extremely easy without any programming. I
highly encourage anyone in science and engineering field to check
this program out.
One other thing: I am not going
to discuss in any substantive way issues surrounding global warming,
AKA “climate change”. First, I am not well qualified to discuss
climatology, and, second, anyone who wants to can find anything they
want about global warming in other places. At the most I will
mention that global warming is often cited as a justification for
many proposed technologies that we will discuss, but that is as far
as I will on that subject.
