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Renewable Energy To Power Aussie SKA 48
schliz writes "New solar and geothermal energy facilities are being built in Australia to provide sustainable energy for the region's Square Kilometer Array (SKA) bid. The Australian Government yesterday announced A$47.3m in funding for a full-scale, hybrid solar and diesel plant for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, and geothermal energy facilities for the Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre, where data from SKA radio telescopes would be processed. ASKAP is part of the Australasian bid to host the $2.5 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which involves 20 countries and will investigate galaxy evolution, dark matter, and the existence of life. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."
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The down side (Score:5, Funny)
The unfortunate side effects:
1. A massive amount of hardware has been required to filter all the content from the SKA to the data-centre, just in case it has any "NC" information in it.
2. All pictures of "Uranus" will be blocked.
3. Attempting to focus in on a picture of a "Black Hole" will have the whole thing disabled for upto a year.
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That would be this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5ZwNw258sQ [youtube.com]
data throughput (Score:2)
One exabyte per day? Holy shit, that's a -lot- of data!
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ugh (Score:1, Funny)
SKA? This is Madness! (Score:5, Funny)
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THIS. IS. AUSTRALIAAAAAAAAA!!!!
*kicks into the black hole that's about to be destroyed*
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Our island!
In the middle of the sea!
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You'd prefer some kind of ska-fusion?
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But man, that's some loud music if it gets its own power plant.
OMG what the heck is this slashdot? (Score:2)
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/08/2385111.htm?section=australia [abc.net.au]
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Last space news? What about that Japanese asteroid probe which is set to touch down tonight?
Get some perspective on this guys (Score:2)
Solar will suck on the two or three cloudy days each year but otherwise has potential, it's about an obvious solution for solar as you can get because getting conventional power out there is likely to cost more.
As for geothermal, drilling deep holes is very expensive but there is some pretty hot rock down there
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Way, way out in the middle of the desert you can either truck in a pile of fuel forever, run a very long, very expensive and very lossy power line, or try to use a power source that is already there.
Solar will suck on the two or three cloudy days each year but otherwise has potential, it's about an obvious solution for solar as you can get because getting conventional power out there is likely to cost more.
Searching google [google.com] gave me 341000 results, starting with a few businesses which deliver solar power and some descriptions of projects, so I doubt this idea is novel.
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AU is a good choice, great skies (Score:3, Interesting)
But no altitude (Score:2)
In the Mallee, out around Hattah, I would go waking at night, using Venus to light my way and the Magellanic clouds would be easy to see. But if you want to do optical astronomy you need to do it at altitude and with clear skies. We don't have that.
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And when it rain it would all turn beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere.
It's neat because I used to look at them all the time when i was little.
So yeah probably better for radio.
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For a country of their size? They're a continent, you fuck-ass. AU is a lot larger than it appears on most flat maps. Try looking at it on a globe sometime before you come up with BS like this.
Or perhaps the "fuck-ass" is referring to our population size, which would be more logical.
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Cool! (Score:4, Funny)
zpool (Score:1)
They will probably need... (Score:3, Funny)
They will probably need Skatalites for some exiting soundbites each day...
Geothermal is green NOT renewable (Score:3, Informative)
Photographs of the first dish (Score:1)
SKA for South Africa! (Score:1)