It seems the Renewables Energy debate has reached new levels of hype and hysteria recently, with arguments descending into assinine number crunching to justify titanic expenditure requirements.
"If we put 400 sq miles under solar panels in the middle of the Sahara...."
"It would only take 93,000 windmills on 39 windfarms 30 miles off the coast of...."
"We only need to re-cable 358,000 klms to upgrade the grid across the countries of...."
Holy crap. It's gotten so bad that I've come up with a new Renewable Energy designed with something for everyone:
Monkey Power
- It's renewable.
- It's low-carbon (zero carbon during operation with methane storage).
- It works 24/7/365.
- It can replace coal *and* gasolene (put some monkeys in your car!)
- It's more energy dense than wind or solar.
- It doesn't need any additional grid requirements over that of solar or wind.
- You can put the power stations anywhere. Only the survival of the monkeys need be considered.
In short, it covers all the Climate Change mitigation requirements - and does it better than solar or wind!
We only have a few things to do to get this up and running. I estimate we only need about 15 monkeys per person, with enough storage for 3 extras to allow for intermittency due to fatigue or death.
The choice of monkey species is important. It must be low-carbon, clone-friendly and strong enough to last at least 5 years to allow for growth of new monkeys to replace them.
Waste management is an issue. Monkey poo is pretty toxic, but we can recycle it to grow the renewable fuel - bananas.
We will need at least 20 bananas per day per monkey.
And we'd need one bicycle per monkey and 10% extra for maintenance repacements, etc.
So we're going to need the following basic materials (allowing for a world human population of around 9 billion):- 135,000,000,000 operating monkeys
- 27,000,000,000 storage monkeys
- 9,900,000,000 bicycles
- 10,000,000,000 banana trees
- 9,900,000,000 bicycle generators
- 4,950,000,000 cubic metres of concrete (.5 per monkey station)
- 150 cloning labs (to grow 162,000,000,000 monkeys every 5 years)
- 500,000,000,000 square feet (11,478,420.5693297 acres) of fertile land under bananas (4 ft radius circle per tree)
- Best to site all power stations near the equator (but NOT on islands that may be underwater soon!).
- Best to plant banana trees around the power stations to eliminate the need for transportation.
- Grow a further 20% banana trees to allow for diseases.
- Use straighter cavendish bananas. These may be packed more efficiently than bendy lady fingers.
- Monkey poo processing should be done on site. We can't have this stuff moving around the country.
- Methane from monkey 'gas excretions' can be used to provide lighting and power for the poo processors.
We should be able to get this up and running in under 10 years if we can get the co-operation of every country in the world and spend approximately 467.5 Trillion US Dollars.... OH SHIT - there's a problem! Bananas contain radioactivity!
Better scrap THIS idea, then!
