Even if you used duct tape?
Duct tape should do it. You can do anything with enough duct tape and a place to stand! You won't even need a fulcrum.
I'm much less excited about coal than oil. The main reason is that I think it can be slowly replaced without fundamentally changing infrastructure (unlike oil). If you plug alternative energy sources into 'the grid' customers don't really care or have to do anything. ...
True, but I think most people underestimate how tough it is to replace
a lot of electrical generation with alternatives.
Solar PV is currently at about 0.3% of the mix. So to take it up to something big, let's use 30% for EZ math, that is 100x the total amount of solar PV we have installed since day one. That's a LOT! We would have to install 10 times everything we've installed to date, and do that every year for ten years. Big project.
In fact, we'd probably need to bring some coal plants on line for the first 2 years, just to generate enough electricity to generate the electricity you need to make the solar PV panels! They require about 2 years worth of their output to produce them in the first place.
Then consider that most of that power is produced in about 6 hours during the day. Very roughly, that means that 30% average becomes 4x while they produce, so ~ 120% of average for those ~ 6 hours. That's offset somewhat, since we use more power during the day, but... to get that average, you also need to account for the short and cloudy days. So peak power will be huge, just to hit 30% average.
Which all means you need to either store the energy ($ and some is wasted in the conversion), or just let it be wasted. Both approaches will increase the cost significantly.
Bottom line, renewables are fairly easy to integrate into the grid when they make up a small % of average, but get increasingly difficult and expensive beyond that.
I was reading about a plan to store/shift just
a few hours of power, just to level demand with production to avoid so much 'peaker' power plant expense. It involved pumped storage, and they pointed out there really aren't many places where it can be used. It was expensive, and there were still environmental concerns. And this was just for a few hours. What about a few days with limited sunshine and wind?
I calculated a while back that just trying to store a single day's output of a typical coal plant in IL would involve storing an energy level on par with the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And we have about 20 of those plants in IL.
Maybe next gen nuclear will replace coal, and renewables will supplement the nukes?
-ERD50