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(Solar) Power to the Masses
D3 writes "This report on a solar power tower (pdf) looks extremely interesting. Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world? How cool would that be?" The NY Times has a good article on solar power in Japan.
It requires a complete re-think of the utilities infrastructure and removal of idiots that run them.
If a normal neighborhood had 2 stationary panels on each home's roof pointed south that backfed to the utility power and they did the storage, it could be a reality right now.
but it's easier to keep that 1929 Coal plant running and those power commisioners that have no fricking clue or care outside their pocket or circle of power than to change to current technology.
Anyone here can easily reduce their power consumption to 1/10th of what they use now. Couple that with a city wide solar network with some wind plants like in Macinaw city or out west and you can easily have clean power.
it's changing government, and the wasteful companies (running 1500 horse power pumps from 1955-1957 instead of buying noew high efficency pumps) that will be nearly impossible...
Changing to non polluting power will be more difficult than getting bill gates to embrace and use linux.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Another obvious stirling use is as part of your home heating plant.
British Gas to launch individual CHP boiler for homes
British Gas has announced that it is developing a household boiler that generates both heat and electricity, which will increase energy efficiency and cut costs for customers, allowing them to sell excess electricity back to the Grid.
The new combined heat and power (CHP) boilers, developed by MicroGen Energy
Think about it. You burn gas to stay warm. (if you don't have a heating season....then you don't) Why not burn the gas to do work? You still get your heat. And the work can make electricity.
I am not a EE, but having a power Co-Op as a major client I know there is a significant line loss (power loss) associated with transmitting power over long distances. There are also major financial, political and citizen factors to overcome when building new transmission lines. The technology looks cool. I think getting the power from a to b will be a bigger issue.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
global warming will increase crop yields, provide more rain in some fertile but drought-ridden areas, and increase the usefulness of the currently useless solar power?
And, of course, there's always the fear of global cooling, which would put us into another iceage and take out tons of inland cities not prepared to deal with the barren landscape. Not to mention the fact that europe would be decimated if another ice age happened, they'd have to take over africa again and live amoungst their ancient mistakes.
global warming sounds like a picnic compared to global cooling, where do I sign up?
Latewire
According to http://www.humboldt1.com/~michael.welch/pvpayback. pdf photovoltaic payback in all energy costs associated with manufacture is anywhere from 3-7 years, depending on photovoltaic type (CIS or SC-SI) and assuming 5 hours/day of direct sunlight. Interesting read. --M
SHEC Labs in Canada is also working on small(er) units, and potentially catalytic hydrogen generation! You can see videos of their prototype in action here.
Wah!
This is why superconductor technology is so important. The problem is a general lack of high temperature superconductors. We need them for two reasons. One is power transmission, and the other is heat transmission. A high temperature superconductor with sufficient surface area makes the ultimate heat sink. These two purposes make superconductors indispensible and necessary for the next evolutionary step in technology, which demands greater power storage (or generation) and greater power transmission.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
wind power is more efficient, less costly, and most importantly has acutal commerically viablity.
If only the lamers in California would not complain about windmills harming birds...
They can't have it both ways, cheap clean energy with zero environmental cost.
Oh wait, logical thinking and emotional liberalism don't mix.
Solar insolation is about 1kW/m^2.. Well, except for the earths rotation. Assuming a non-tracking system, we have to divide by a factor of pi, so thats 300 W/m^2.. Well, except that the average efficiency of solar cells is under 15%, so thats 45W/m^2. Now, the average home has what? 2 people in it, and the per-capita electrical usage, averaged over the course of a year is 1kW. So, you need 2kW for that home, and only get 45W/m^2. So, you need 50 square meters of solar cell, correctly angled south. And this is the best case.
Now account for clouds and dirty cells. Unless you clean the cells every few days and pressure wash them biweekly, better increase the square meters of solar cells another 50%. So, thats 60-80 square meters of cell/house..
Now the next question. Where do you store all the energy you'll use at night? If you don't store it, where does it come from? Fancy burying a few ton flywheel in your backyard? How about aa closet filled with lead and sulpheric acid batteries? If you're going to use hydrogen to store it, better double or triple the square meters of solar cell for those inefficiencies.
The same problem applies to 'Solar 2'. You need about 1000 of them to equal the average energy of a nuclear power plant. And another 299000 to equal the mean energy used by the US. To replace all energy used in the US requires about a million Solar 2's.
Orbital Solar Power relies on the fact that the power would be transmitted to earth via microwave. Why not do the same with these solar power stations?
Since these require a lot of space, and the microwave receiver requires a large area to prevent harmful levels of radiation, they are made for one another. Simply put the mirrors on top of the microwave receiver, and you'll have the added benefit of not having to worry about covering the area with gravel to prevent plant growth. Though that may not be a problem in the desert.
Of course, the fact that they can generate power overnight makes this a very minor necessity.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Let's assume we want to provide all of the world's energy needs by solar power. If I recall correctly, the world currently uses about 500 exajoules of primary energy per year, or about 16 terawatts. The sun provides about 1000 watts/m^2 at our distance. However, the overall system efficiency would be somewhere around 1% of that (say 20% solar cell efficiency, 75% loss from night/day/latitude geometry , 40% weather loss, 70% storage conversion and transmission loss). That gives 10W/m^2 average output, so we need 1.6 million square kilometers, about the size of Alaska.
That sounds bad, but it's actually only 0.3% of the earth's surface area. I would guess that the best way to implement that much collector would be to develop plastic based collectors in huge sheets that are floated on the oceans. Convert the energy to hydrogen on site and pipe it to the consuming countries. By eliminating fossil fuel usage, you free up huge sources of raw materials to make all of that plastic.
You could argue that that much area would screw with the earth's climate by changing reflectivity. However, at least it's not generating a layer of greenhouse insulator. Moreover, current agriculture practices alter the reflectivity of a much larger percentage of the earth's surface.
(Don't bother replying to suggest outer space collectors. Say they were 30X more efficient than earth-based systems. Nobody's going to launch satellites with a surface area 3% the size of Alaska. We've been trying to put up a space station the size of my back yard for 20 years now, and still haven't finished.)
Very good questions, as it happens, I have answers!
In California it costs around $15-$20K to refit a house with solar panels. Due to recent legislation the power company MUST pay the wholesale price to any of their customers who generate power. It takes around 20 years for the cost of the panels to be recouped.
Note that these numbers assume that the cost of power stays stable, which is fairly unlikely. If the cost per kilowatthour increases then it will take proprotionately less time for the panels to pay for themselves. A long term investment, but ultimately worthwhile.
In terms of pure energy costs (neverminding money) it takes a typical solar panel about three years to generate the amount of energy it took to produce. Some panels are made from recycled wafers (typically wafers which were rejected for chip manufacture) these take about 3 months to make the electricity that went into their production.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
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Looking at our electrical bills over the last year averaging between $100 and $150 a month, I decided to look into putting in solar panels and here is what I found out.
For 7K out of pocket (after tax credits, rebates, etc.), I can get a 2KW solar panel system with grid tie installed. This would give me, conservatively, about 496 KW hours a month in production. This would cut my usage by 2/3s. For 12K out of pocket, I can get a 3KW system which would give me about 720 KW hours a month in production and would completely clear my needs.
With a grid tie system, I run my meter backwards when my production is greater than my demand. This means that any electricity that I generate is credited against my bill at the rate in play (I believe you also get peak pricing withi this setup) at the time I generate it.
Bottom line, is that for a 12K investment, I can clear an average bill of $150 a month. This means that in a little over 6 1/2 years I have paid off the system. Or you can think of this as giving me an annual return of 12.5% on my initial investment. That is pretty damn good!
Doesn't anyone get it? Forget what the submitter tossed in, and the sunny-country factor, this tech is potentially the real deal for one reason:
STORAGE
That is, the plant they describe makes it possible to generate electricity any time, day or night, rain or shine. The only limit is that you can't run more than 13 hours without sun at one go.
This means you can throttle it up and down according to need like a real power plant.
According to their numbers (which aren't explained, but I assume are based on the 4 years they've been running the prototype plant) they can produce at $.05/kWh, which is below the retail price of electricity in the US, and probably much cheaper than in oil-hungry places like Japan. Also, since those costs are largely (wholly local) construction, land, and maintenance, sunny countries with low labor costs and some desert (India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, etc.) would realize an even better price.
Then there are circumstances they don't mention working in their favor, like:
World oil production is levelling off and may decrease if more easy reserves aren't found.
Natural gas supplies aren't as plentiful as hoped.
No one is building power plants at anything like the rate needed to keep up with demand, and
Nuclear is still politically untouchable.
Throw it all together, and a new plant that can produce at that price is a steal.
Now, if they could float the mirrors around an offshore platform, even the land costs would disappear...
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Obviously, that isn't going to happen now, tomorrow or ever.
At the same time, using fossil fuels is clearly destructive and a Very Bad Idea.
So, we have to look at other non-carbon producing energy sources. Nuculer?
We could run breeder reactors that generate their own fuel - plutonium. Unfortunately, plutonium is also very handy for making really nastly bombs, and given the number of assholes in the world, this makes breeder reactors politically unfeasible for universal implmentation.
So, then regular nuke plants? There's only so much Uranium on the planet and it is a fairly limited resource. I saw someone on Frontline say that if we converted over to nukes for 100% of the world's power, we'd run out of Uranium in less than 30 years.
I'd also point out that we'd then be saddled with tons of nasty toxic crap that no one would want anywhere near them, and this nasty toxic crap will likely remain nasty toxic crap until sometime well after the next ice age. So, nuculer isn't going to do it to it.
But we still have to power up 15 or 16 terawatts of Mr Coffee machines, hair curlers, computers, and all kinds o' junk and useless nonsense we clutter our lives with. So WHERE is the juice going to come from?
1. by changing the needs base. removing automobiles from the fossil feul food chain by cracking water with solar energy to make hydrogen for hypercars will extend the life of fossil fuel energy production, and by reducing the demand for it, reduce its price.
2. by maximising efficiency of use. devices that use less juice will be at a great advantage in the market place when:
3. Energy markets are opened up to speculators who greedily distort energy prices to their own advantage, driving the need for greater efficiency to reduce dependency on the vampiric rat bastards.
4. Homes are made to be energy self sufficient. Getting people off the grid is the most important thing we can do to reduce energy consumption. when people have to pay for their own power and have to live on an energy budget, they will wildly seek out hyper efficient appliances, and this will encourage non-fossil fuel devices. It will also encourge people to sell energy back to the vampiric grid.
5. population reduction. We need to get rid of people. Gently and gradually. If we had one tenth the number of people roaming this shattered little planet, light use of carbon fuels (wood, methane, etc.) would even be permissible.
So, that's what needs to be done if we ever expect to have a sustainble future that includes something resembling an industrial civilisation. Get rid of people, make energy expensive, and make people responsible for their energy consumption.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Isaac Assimov wrote about the idea of using 50 satelites with sun collector to feed a country by electricity transmited by microwaves.
Thhe there is some strange russian satelite that uses to open a big shinny umbrella over some industrial city to give sunlight during their nights to save energy. But, is it possible that the original russian idea was to build the previous array of suncollectors that Assimov wrote about?
Is it nowadays, possible to transmit microwaves with electricity, like Tessla spoke half a century ago?
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
Second, when you said "feasible", you meant "profitable". Certainly such a power plant is feasible; it has already been done!
Third, regarding the profitability, just how many of these solar tower power plants do you think we could be building with the $5,000,000,000 per month that the USA is spending to be in Iraq? Not to mention the $100,000,000,000 that we already spent getting there and being there so far?
If we as taxpayers agree that we should squander such a huge pile of money, we should ask if instead of spending it on Iraq, it would be better to spend on a project that would in one fell swoop 1) create lots of construction jobs in the USA 2) reduce our alleged need to obtain fossil fuels from wildlife preserves in Alaska and elsewhere 3) increase our electrical supply 4) reduce our dependence on foreign oil and probably improve our trade imbalance at the same time 5) weaken oil cartels 6) reduce emissions of greenhouse gases 7) reduce emissions that cause acid rain 8) improve the stability of our electrical grid by adding energy storage capacity 9) satisfy our putative duty under the Kyoto Treaty, to the amazement and gratitude of the rest of the world? The economic analysis of whether or not we should build such plants might need to be more profound than simply "how many $/kilowatthour will it cost"?
Well, There's always a chance someone on Slashdot doesn't know this, but... Global Warming / Cooling is junk science. The proponents have blocked appropriate measures of earth's temperatures, which involve measuring the ocean's aggregate temperature, and have done so for about a decade now. The measurement would have involved a solitary underwater explosion, and the sound wave would determine the ocean's temperature (although salinity has an effect, it is far from a trivial science). This would be a tremendous mass of ocean water.
The "Save the whales" crowd resurfaced decrying the untold damage to aquatic life by doing this, which is ridiculous compared to doing nothing to find out what is happening to our planet.
Air temperature measurements are a waste of time, especially in urban areas, which have an elevated measure of heat because of the asphalt roofs, roads, etc. Measuring the ice caps is also silly, because their size changes seasonally, like with weather cycles. Everyone remembers the Halloween blizzard in Minnesota. And the 65 degree day in late December 15 years later. The only useful measurement would be of a volume of water (not a tiny pocket of air) the size of the ocean, at the equator. But that's being blocked bye environmental activists; they must have something to hide; what's a few deaf gray whales if it will save the planet?
Did you bother to mention that the various "greenhouse gasses" are mere precursors to tropospheric ozone, which is the hazardous smog that is discussed at the Weather Underground ? All of the sudden, ozone is bad and good.
I read a statistic once that in order to be entirely solar with our power, we would cover the earth 11% over with the dumb cells. Considering the nasty chemicals involved in the manufacture of solar cells, and that solar cells are not simply recycled, and fail in a decade or so (fragile materials), I can't imagine why any earth-first crowd would want yet another major source of toxic waste.
I have long thought that the only solar cells of any use on our planet (since the stuff in space is pretty handy, I'll admit) are the green ones in my lawn and garden. They produce oxygen, which every living animal needs. If you live in a newly developed neighborhood (like in suburban USA), the best thing you can do for your environment is plant plenty of trees on your lawn. Sure, it means raking, but in my neighborhood, I have 100+ year-old oak trees, and they are positively enchanting. They keep the sun off my lawn so I don't have to water, and they keep the sun off my roof (remember, these are mature oak trees) which reduces my AC costs. McDonalds passes out seedling trees on Earth Day, so it really doesn't cost you anything. Sure, it'd make more sense if they passed them out on Arbor Day, but no one remembers when that is, despite it being the more venerable day of commemoration by a good century or more.