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A Fully Distributed Power Grid?
rleyton writes "There's an interesting and topical black-out article on an "internet inspired" hydrogen powered energy network. The premise is homes, cars, factories and offices store up hydrogen when energy is available, and supply it into the new energy network when it's not. Certainly an intriguing idea, with some interesting comments on future power management. Feasible in the next "three decades"? Perhaps."
The hydrogen wasn't the problem, it was the fact that the skin was made of solid rocket fuel. It was actually the skin that was burning, since hydrogen burns so hot you can't see the flames.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I'm sorry, but the above poster is a moron. Hydrogen is not plentiful as an energy source. Hydrogen is an energy storage system.
Now - some basic physics: you get hydrogen from water. Then you burn hydrogen with air, and get water back. The amount of energy it took to get the hydrogen from the water is equal to the amount you got, minus the loss from inefficiency (which is substantial).
Therefore, using hydrogen as an energy source is like changing money to two different fixed currencies as a revenue source - you don't make anything, and you end up losing things to the middlemen conversion industries.
Unless you can find pure, elemental hydrogen naturally, the hydrogen/water power system is a storage vessel only - a well-compressed but inefficient energy storage system.
Anyone who believes otherwise either has not taken basic science (grade 10 should cover it) or hasn't thought it through and is just a loudmouthed idiot. Either way, shouldn't be discussing issues they have no knowledge of.
Actually, the line is "oh, the humanities!" if you listen carefully. Funny, either way it doesn't make much sense. Whatever. The reason the Hindenburg blew up was it was coated in a magnesium compound similar to rocket fuel.
Transmission lines are typically ~10k-100kV AC. The substation drops that down to ~1kV for distribution, and the local transformers drop that to 220 into houses.
The primary reasons for using AC rather than DC is that transformers are cheaper and more efficient for AC. As a bonus, AC is actually safer if you get shocked by it, as your muscles aren't locked into a single direction...they have a chance to relax and let you disengange contact.
No, I don't think they would have everyone supplying DC. The best idea I can come up with is for there to be one synchronizing signal on the lines, and the distributed sources have to match phase with that...but what if someone's gets out of phase? What if someone tries to jam that signal?
The offshore oil rigs "burn off" the "waste" natural gas that comes out with the oil. You might have noticed the "eternal flames" on almost every offshore oil rig in the world, other than Baharain(sp?).
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The problem is maintenance. It can cost you a big deal of money to keep the flywheel in the working condition. But really, it seems it is the most efficient way to store energy at this specific moment.
How much would said "photovoltaic" cells cost, and how durable are they? Can they withstand high winds, impact from softball-sized hail, treelimbs, leaves, etc? What's the maintainence on them like? I live in an area where we get hail, high winds (even tornadoes), ice storms in the winter, etc. How well will these work in those conditions? And when they (and everything does eventually) break, how easily can you replace them? At what expense? As it stands now, with "typical" shingles, they last a long time, take quite a bit of abuse, and if they get blown off in a windstorm, well, you're looking at what, $30-40 to replace them? With labor?
:)
I'm not saying it can't be done, nor that it shouldn't be done, and I have no idea what the state of of "solar power" is these days, but those were concerns in the 90's and they may still be concerns today. Of course, if someone would pour 1% of the total energy revenues into Solar energy, I'm sure research would accelerate.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Approximately $2.85 / watt in bulk; $7 - $10 /watt installed with power electronics, etc.
Yes, actually, they are tested with an ice launcher at NIST and other standards-testing labs; we're talking tempered architectural glass frames, generally speaking. I have seen people waste some time hitting PowerLight modules with an aluminum baseball bat to no discernible effect. The skylight-type panels mounted to the roof in a fairly nontrivial manner, using standard hardware. The shingles (From Uni-Solar) come off as often as normal shingles do;
Maintenance: wiping down the panels if they get pollen or dust covered, possibly replacing the inverter every ca. 10 years.
Replacement: you should have a licensed installer do it, and again, replacement costs as above, though overall system costs have been declining by about 5% compounding annually for quite a while, and that may be accelerating shortly.
This already happens in detroit. Its optional. You get a discount if you do it. They come and put your AC on this second meter. That 2nd meter is at a reduced rate. The power company can cut that 2nd meter when power gets tight. Or they can have rolling black outs of just the AC systems.
Its a pretty good system.
Worse, it doesn't burn completely in the rig flares; a lot escapes through the center, and CH4 is about 16x as effective per molecule as CO2 in terms of greenhouse effects.
I should mention here just for the sake of redundancy that CH4 in a fuel cell does "burn" almost completely clean, and without NOx or SOx, because at no point in the process is anything actually being blown up or set on fire.
That statement is patently absurd. Think about what you're saying: Every 8 hours, a few oil rigs in the gulf of mexico are burning an amount of natural gas to equal to the entire U.S. annual energy consumption.
Let's do the math: The US uses about 100 exajoules per year, or 10e20 joules. That would be about 2.7e15 grams of oil, or 2700 megatons. This amount of energy would be burned off by, (let's assume), 200 oil rigs every 8 hours. That would mean that each rig would be burning 39 megatons of waste gas per day, or 450 tons per second. That's as much as 30 Saturn V rockets going full bore for each oil rig.
That little pipe sticking out the side of a rig is simply not burning that much gas.
As someone who works at PowerLight, I'm not sure that I'd *want* to hit one of our panels with a baseball bat- but I'm impressed if you've really seen one stand up to a dedicated whack like that.
In the end, though, you're right - the point remains that the newer modules will stand up to at least as much as most roofs, and, in the case of PowerGuard will often protect the roof, allowing for *less* maintainance of the roofing system rather than more. Solar installations must be tested at extremely high wind speeds (think 150mph+), which varies depending upon their placement (area of the country, height, etc.), so if a tornado takes them off, chances are a substantial portion of the building will go with them.
People may be thinking of the old thin-film panels (like the ones in a calculator), which, because they weren't tempered, would break after getting sneezed on. As you say, the newer panels are very hardy, and Unisolar (because it doesn't have glass that can shatter) are incredibly durable, if relatively inefficient.
And yep, you're certainly right about the costs dropping - one of the coolest things about investing in solar is that you're not only paying a reasonably competitive rate (depending upon your power rates), you're helping to bring the volume up, which will quickly get the cost down to levels that will cause mass adoption.
Grrr...the other persistent canard. = ) As of 1999, it was down to something like 4 years, in an exceedingly conservative and comprehensive calculation:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
And the panels themselves are usually output-waranteed out past 20 years (30 years being a safe bet lifetime for most.) Though I suspect that since we're seeing steadily more automation in the newer plants (and less silicon per watt, and better per-square-meter efficiencies, that this has even gotten better recently.
Photon International goes over these issues in some detail...