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Monday, September 27, 2004

now this would be cool...geek alert!!

so, are you a scientific geek? what is the atmospheric pressure at sea level? what is the atmospheric pressure at denver? or tahoe? ok, i'll tell you. it's about a .55 pound per square inch decrease for every 1000 foot elevation increase.
think about a 1/2 psi pressure differential. if you had a 1/2 psi differential across a 24 inch pipe, that would relate to a force of about 225 pounds. raise the differential, raise the pressure, or force exerted. raise the pipeline to the top of the sierra mountains, or the cascades or hell, even the rockies, with the intake at the base, and what kind of force do you think would be available?

i heard the following on the radio today, and will investigate what is available on the web, but here is a small taste.
what if you piped air from the sea level zone below mountains to the top of the peaks, how many turbines would you be able to spin, to provide electricity, without using fossil fuels (after installation of the piping.)? just think about this for a minute. in british columbia, they have close to a million miles of piping buried to move natural gas. and we have lines running from the midwest all the way to the west coast, for the same reasons.
why not use the natural pressure differential between sea level and high mountain elevations? no dams, no smoke stacks, no freaking fossil fuels from the middle east.
borg-warner (i think that's what i heard on the radio) proposes this. they state that the air velocity would become supersonic, plenty fast enough, given an appropriate volume, to spin generator turbines.

pretty cool, huh? people are thinking, and with oil at the $50 a barrel mark, it is going to be more and more important for us to think inovative, out of the box thoughts.

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