What Your User Profile Says

[peristaltor]

I admit, I am not what anyone would call a Live Journal expert. I surf, I dabble, I post; but mostly I poke and prod in attempts, mostly futile, to emulate what I see others doing. One thing I did notice regards my listed Interests in my Profile page.

Every now and again I click on the clickable, just to see what will happen. I get what I consider interesting results. Take my "electric powered transportation" interest. Only one person on the entire LJ, apparantly, has listed this as an interest, igor_mak. Sadly, most of his posts are in Russian, and he doesn't post much when he is out to sea.

Experimentally, I entered as a parallel interest "electric cars" and "electric transportation," the latter because I happen to own an electric motorcycle and was curious if such a specialized community exists. It does not.

There are those interested in electric cars, but only one community specifically dedicated to them. Most of the names on electricvehicle I recognize from peak_oil and boiling_frog. The addition of "electric vehicles" to the list only narrowed the choices further.

That was not as surprising. The true diehards of the electric vehicle community are a particularly persnickety lot. I know. I've met many. When the web was new, they were on it. When the spam followed close behind, they sequestered themselves from its effects, abandoning the alt dot discussion group and forming an email list, the Electric Vehicle Discussion List. If you want to learn about the best and latest in EVs, that's the place.

Sadly for me, it's a very busy place. Don't make the mistake of using your main email address when you sign up. Expect 50+ messages a day, many covering topics that, once you see them the first few times, will grow tiresome. If I ever see another discussion of Low Rolling Resistance or ac verses DC again. . . . grrrr. Nowadays I lightly skim the list on a yahoo account especially created for the deluge. I clean out the messages a thousand at a time.

That's a problem with the preponderance of bloggy, discussiony, email listy services the web has to offer -- a distinct lack of interoperability. If you spend your time gleaning pearls at one site, why bother with probably repeats tossed elsewhere . . . especially if you spend too much damn time on the computer as it is?

That situation seems to be the case as well with "distributed generation." I've had that listed as an interest for as long as I have known how to enter Interests. Still, no one shares it. After a bit of surfing on Wikipedia, I found some synonyms and entered them to see what would nibble. Only "distributed power" got any matching action . . . from three other users. Oops, two others, not including me.

I guess I find that baffling. I regard distributed generation as essential for reducing both consumption of natural resources and the problematic gasseous emmissions they will likely produce.

Why so little interest?

The answer could be as simple as the EVDL. Perhaps everyone of those tinkerers of home-grown and widely-available power gather together in a place I haven't yet found. It was true of the Turbine Builder's Club, a group fiddling with Tesla turbines. These things promise pretty decent efficiencies in both performance and building ease. As I mentioned in home_effinomic, hooking one of these turbines to a solar collector and an efficient alternator/generator connected to the grid gives one both home hot water and solar electricity (from the excess summer sun).



And, theoretically, this installation could bring the cost per watt of power generated well below that of solar photovoltaics, thus allowing far more folks the opportunity to contribute to the grid.

There are groups dedicated to distributed generation, but only in the industrial sense. Check out WADE, the World Alliance for Decentralized Energy. Included in the Alliance is Capstone Turbine, a company with a nifty microturbine. I've been following them since they were announced sometime around '97 or so, when they proposed to power a series hybrid with their turbine and store the electrical power in flywheels.

So, outside of larger, industrial installations, companies, and alliances, are any of you familiar with smaller distributed generation schemes? Am I just looking in the wrong places for all the systems I could for hours, days and months peruse and persue?

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Of course, there could simply be another, simpler answer to my question. Why don't others share this interest?

I could just be very weird.

I can live with that.