On Electricity (Generation)

Engineer-Poet wrote a piece a few months back that focuses on electricity production; or rather how or what we will need to do to keep pace with people's demands while balancing that with environmental and economic impact. Lengthy but well-reasoned and good reading.

Comments

Related Reading

[CheeseburgerBrown]

For a science-fiction cant on some of the issues raised in TFA, take a look at The Bikes of New York which explores a post-energy crisis near-future in which impoverished people have the option of riding stationary bicycles to spin massive underground flywheels that top up the energy needs of commercial enterprises.

I think creative solutions to electricity problems are in all our futures. Personally, I live about 75% off the grid and am looking forward to be able to afford to get all the way off -- but I need to get my roof re-done before I can even think about solar panels or mounting a wind turbine up there.

At any rate, fiction for thought.

Similar Ideas

[rohar]

The article has some similar ideas to our project. A few comments on the article:

• The existing agricultural system is orientated towards edible food production. Growing, handling and storing crops for energy products is an entirely different industry that currently doesn't exist in North America. Using food production numbers for energy product potential isn't very accurate.
• If agricultural production of energy products had access to affordable and renewable energy, there is a lot more potential for increased production while improving the land as well as better use of by-products than is feasible with the current fossil fuel powered agricultural sector.

Transitionary period for Ethanol

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

The real pay off for ethanol will be when a good process for making ethanol from cellulose is developed. Cellulose is just long chains of sugars, and it is just a matter of time before the chemistry becomes a reality.

In the meantime, ethanol for corn will help get the infrastructure in place.

End carbon emissions in 30 years (how to)

[Spazmania]

How to end US carbon emissions in 30 years without damaging the US economy:

Step 1: Build nuclear power plants. Update the designs with modern technology and give tax incentives for every new nuke plant built.

Reason: 50's and 60's technology nuke plants currently generate electricity for less money than any other technology, even coal. They cost less than a third of what oil and natural gas plants cost. With modern technology its likely we could improve safety while lowering the cost further. Speaking of safety: the worst US accident in 50 years of opererating nuclear energey plants was three mile island, in which no radiation leaked and no one got hurt.

Yes, worse accidents are possible. That means that over a long enough period of time they will happen. But weigh the rare environmental damage from a meltdown against the continuous destruction of the atmosphere by hyrdocarbon burning plants.

Step 2: With the cost of electricty driven cheap enough by nuke plants, shift to hydrogen-based internal combustion engines. With electrolysis done at off-peak hours to generate hydrogen from electricity, every home can be its own fueling station. Hydrogen burns with oxygen to make water, so go drive a steamer.

Reason: Imagine a city, maybe the city you live in, where the only air pollution is the occasional methane from peoples' farts! Nuclear makes its possible and these technologies are economical now, not just in some hypothetical future after more research.

Re:Simple solution

[pherthyl]

You, like I did up until I saw this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_G uys_in_the_Room, think that the brownouts in california were caused by not enough capacity. In actual fact, they were caused by Enron shutting down plants or exporting energy out of the state because they could make more money that way.

Read more about it here, especially the section entitled Supply and Demand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricit y_crisis

Because corn = money, that's why.

[Engineer-Poet]

The US has a huge farm lobby and agribusiness giants like ADM which make huge amounts of money on corn. Actually, the farmers have mostly made their money from subsidies, as production has glutted the market since the end of the acreage set-asides under Agr. Sec'y Earl Butz. ADM made massive amounts of money turning subsidized corn into fructose and selling it into a sweetener market driven by protectionist sugar tariffs, so it was natural for it to go to fermenting subsidized corn and selling it for the 51 cent/gallon fuel subsidy.

Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.

As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.

Sustainability actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:

1. Pyrolyze cellulose to charcoal and fuel gas.
2. Burn fuel gas in a molten-carbonate or solid-oxide fuel cell, producing carbon dioxide, electricity and waste heat.
3. Feed carbon dioxide to a closed bioreactor with algae.
4. Extract algal fats, sugars and starches.
5. Ferment sugars and starches (easily handled with common yeasts) to ethanol.
6. Distill ethanol using fuel-cell waste heat.

It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.