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Tech That Will Save Our Species - Solar Thermal Power
NoMoreCoal writes "Salon has up a story by Joe Romm, former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, discussing a lesser-known alternative energy solution. It's a technology that (he claims) is ready to provide zero-carbon electric power big, fast, cheap and (most importantly) right now: solar thermal power. 'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. CSP makes use of the most abundant and free fuel there is, sunlight, and key countries have a vast resource. Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources.'" Interesting stuff, even if he does mention the Archimedes Death Ray.
The difference between solar thermal power and more well-known solar photovoltaics.
Amnesty International
Thats 246 billion square feet.
Thats somewhere between the size of New Jersey and New Hampshire.
Talk about pie in the sky... its more realistic to be talking about microwave power stations in orbit!
this is similar to a nuclear reactor, where heat is causing water to spin a turbine. i suspect that that this will do the same, but it will be faster.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
as long as we don't run our force fields at full strength. The additional pressure on the magma could create enough pressure to cause an eruption. Even the ancients knew that ...
[cf. Stargate Atlantis, season 2, episode "Inferno"]
there are many more problems. just off the top of my head:
1) How much toxic materials will be required to create and maintain a 92-by-92-mile square grid. 92 *MILES*, people. like parent said, the size of New Jersey.
2) For you environmentalist types who can't tolerate the thought of drilling for oil off the coast, what do you think a 92 square mile solar blanket will do to the native wildlife?
3) How will this power be transmitted to consumers? Voltage loss is a real issue for long-distance transmission.
Why not simply build a nuclear powerplant closer to the consumers?
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States
That little line there makes me ask, "well, if I keep on burning coal, just how warm would the planet really get..."
This is my sig.
... now if only we could do something about the over population...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
My guess would be that it would cost less than the Iraq war. Sounds like a good deal, no?
I think it's quite interesting that a lot of the poorer, indeed third world [LOL - Australia ;-)], countries of today could be the power suppliers of tomorrow. Of course that will depend to a large degree on them stopping killing each other long enough to allow the current rich nations to come in and setup the plants!
The problem then becomes one of supply - how do you get the Solar Thermal riches of the Sahara up to Europe without massive power losses. There was a Chinese scientist 5 or 10 years ago who put forward an idea for a "Super Grid" to allow us to move power around the globe more efficiently. Maybe this needs a bit more thought!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Before criticizing that type of technology, you really should read the article, you know. You might learn a thing or two.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
What happens when we suck the heat out of a 8,464 square mile area in the southwest? It gets colder! And if you're like me you fully believe that the next great climate change will be global cooling. I don't like where this is going...
It just so happens we we value our culturally embedded norms/values of freedom of speech/religion (they can can that one for all i care)/choice/education/etc and in our globalising/internationalising society we find more and more such norms collide with those of our potential/defacto provider nations. Technology will not save us (it will for the US). The only thing that will is finding a modus for the import and export of culture which usually accompanies the import and export of goods/services/cash/labour.
Really? There are places on earth that have no access to the sun? Where?
Second, even if it's not a suitable way of generating power EVERYWHERE, who cares? It's renewable and non-carbon emitting, and anything that reduces emissions is a good thing. And for places where it is suitable, the excess power can be sold to other places.
As others have mentioned, a solar farm almost 100 miles per side is completely impractical. Even a set of 13-by-13-mile farms -one for each state- might work for Texas and California, but would be much harder to pull off in Rhode Island or Hawaii just because of space concerns. Then there's the Alaska issue.
Solar thermal is a nice thought. It might even work for some states. But it's not the One Magic Bullet that people seem to be seeking.
I wasn't criticizing the technology. I was criticizing the summary. And, yes, I RTFA, and yes, the first question was an actual question.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Generating the entire US's energy needs in one central location is only useful if you have a way to transmit the power to where it's needed.
I like the idea of making more, better use of solar energy, but the operation should be more dispersed, or else we're going to need to wait for a revolution in transmission (high-temperature superconductor would be wonderful if we had it).
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
No, it doesn't.
Just for comparison, the state of New Jersey covers 8722 square miles.
Take a look at all those mountain top and strip mining operations that environmentalists are all up in arms about. They cover relatively small amounts of area. How would this be any better? Yeah, the southwest has lots of mostly unpopulated space, but I'm sure environmentalists would find plently of rare desert rodents and plant species that would be obliterated from such an operation.
For us humble taxpayers, yes, but won't somebody think of the weapons industry?
they conveniently forget about all the life that exists in a desert environment?
There are some unique species, some that can teach us on how to deal with limited resources, but I guess since pictures only show sand and cactus instead of cute little deer its ok to cover them up?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour.' And improvements in magnetic confinement could easily bring fusion power down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour...and advances in the production of antimatter could yield power too cheap to meter...assuming it's even possible to do any of the above at all. I love how pundits can wave a magic wand at substantial engineering obstacles and make them all go away when trying to push their new pet gadget or cause on the rest of us. And when pigs fly, we can use them to power our flying cars!
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources. Brushing aside the question of what to do when the weather doesn't cooperate, exactly how does this fellow expect us to efficiently distribute the power harvested by this "enormous solar resource"? It's not feasible to power the entire United States from a 92x92 mile square in the middle of a southwestern U.S. desert because transmission losses to, say, the entire East Coast would be horrendous.
All of this handwaving about does an injustice to a real, clean, abundant power-generating resource that we have virtually ignored: nuclear fission. Every coal plant in the U.S. could be replaced in a few decades if we chose to do so. Japan and France have excellent safety records with this technology and power most of their country via splitting atoms. Ignoring this technology while betting on pie-in-the-sky stuff that's unproven, undeveloped, and unknown to "save our species" is just silly.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Just to make something clear: there is no such thing as a solar plant equivalent to a nuclear plant, unless you build it in orbit. Nuclear plants can shake you all night long. Solar only produces well where and when it's sunny. (At least these designs have the advantage that some of them are decently efficient in partial-sun situations; solar panels won't do this until another generation or so, they don't produce good current in even partial shade.)
The difference between nuclear and solar is that nuclear by itself can solve all our power needs, and solar can not. Granted, solar plus some sort of power storage system which could include a fuel cell system, flywheels, or practically anything else could do the job. But then you get into issues of power storage which we don't need to go into here and now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
i came here to say that too ...
Show me some working, power-producing fusion and/or antimatter power plants.
I'll show you some working, power-producing solar-thermal power plants.
Geez. Heating water with solar power really isn't rocket science. The improvements proposed for these power plants are mainly in engineering. On the other hand, we're still working on the science for fusion and antimatter.
The problem with this plan is that it doesn't scale out. It's subject to the Windmill effect, where it's contesting with other uses for land, and eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape.
We need to move our solar power generation to space. Something along the lines of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite
Except that this, too, does not scale.
However, if we modified the satellite to act as a go-between rather than as a primary collector, and placed our solar panels in orbit around the sun rather than in orbit around the earth, that would scale out indefinitely. By the time we ran out of room to grow, we'd have a Dyson sphere and be capturing the radiant energy output of the entire sun.
This is what we should do. If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What a waste. There is a reason that this has not been developed faster. I would venture to guess that there is a LOT of heat dissipation (ie wasted energy) with this process. Also, the surface area required to obtain the same amount of energy as a solar cell must be much larger. Our resources should be focused on making more efficient batteries and solar cells rather than trying to bake the world's largest potato.
What boggles my mind is why places like Perth, Australia, don't build these things and use the heat for desalination instead of building a plant that requires power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth,_Western_Australia#Water_supply
I seem to recall that the sun is only available during the daytime. The one major flaw with solar power is that you need a lot of that power when the sun isn't available. This is especially true in more extreme northern and southern climates.
So you definitely need some means to switch the power, transferring from areas that have sunlight at any given moment to those that do not. Having said that, there's no reason not to start down this road. It will take us decades to build out all this infrastructure and the technology for harnessing, storing, and transmitting power will improve along the way. I don't see any substantially better options coming down the pike.
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Haha, as a dual-citizen, I love getting questions about what Australia is like. Some people do think it's third-world! lol.
Interestingly enough, Australia derives approx. 8% of its electricity from renewable sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_commercialization_in_Australia
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know the area of intense heat will be invisible-- how big would it be?
Thinking back to wind turbines for unexpected kills.
Also, would sucking the energy out of an area (and sending it elsewhere as electricity) lower its temperature and possibly change the micro-climate?
If we put 35 billion into this technology, we would not be raising the price of food and fuel and we would not be lowering our m.p.g. by 10% either. I recently went on a trip and got "countryside real gas" instead of "cityside 85% gas" and got 35 extra miles on the same tank-- that's 3mpg (14%!). It's like a hidden tax having to fill up 1/7 more than with real gasoline.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Nuclear is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. There's still a few major issues I see with nuclear:
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
I know that other countries have made nuclear work (France is the most cited example.) However, those countries have been able to regulate the plants more closely without conservatives jumping all over their governments for 'promoting socialism' and 'over-regulation'. Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future plants can improve efficiency - through improved design/scale - to drop the price to between 6 & 8 cents.
Yea, a german solar power plant bought up Nanosolar's entire production for the next 24 months. Grrrr.
NS solar tech is much cheaper than current solar tech- As in 50k->30k for putting solar power in your 2000sq' house (45 year vs 25 year payoff-- but that assumes no more inflation-- with historical inflation more like 22 vs 12 year payoff).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Bush is.
I hate printers.
It's well worth examining here what "begs the question" means in a technical sense -- and not as a usage Nazi. I understand that most people mean "leads to the question" when they say "beg the question."
"Begging the question" is to ask a question which only makes sense to ask after certain other questions have been answered. The classic example is, "have you stopped beating your wife?" You cannot expect a meaningful answer to that question unless you have established that the person being asked has, at some time in the past, beat his wife. It's not valid to ask the first question until the second has been dealt with.
In this case, the argument is that plants such as this could produce a given amount of energy does not beg the question of the resources needed to create or maintain them. It leads to that question, but does not beg that question. If we were, on the other hand, to ask the questions in reverse order, we would be begging the question. It makes no sense to consider asking how many of our current resources will will apply to these plants until we have answered how many of our current resources these plants will replace.
Furthermore, "How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?" is a kind of catch-all question. You aren't saying, "Well this stuff requires a million kilos of unobtainium per watt produced, wouldn't that be more expensive than oil over the next twenty years?" That would be a valid question.
Asked generically, your question amount to this:Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to go on as we have indefinitely? This indeeds begs a question, namely, which is can we?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Is there enough material on the face of the earth to construct a Dyson sphere? Oh, and just to ask that question, I had to dig through three layers of ridiculousness. Are you sure you're not after a sci-fi forum?
I hate printers.
Not necessarily: We could give monetary incentive to buildings' owners to operate heliostat mirrors on their roofs toward energy company's solar tower (there can be even a competition between various "sun buyers" in single area, a multiple choice for aiming-for-dollars) and homesteads already occupy a lot of land.
Your space plan is, of course, better for all the good reasons, but we are not there yet.
Language evolves. Get over it.
maybe you two can get a room
I thought the plan was to "pull a Niven" and have the mirrors burn off all the cloud cover.
This makes me wonder, is generating electricity using this method more efficient to do with heating water to go into a turbine... or using a (huge) stirling engine? I've read that a Stirling Engine is the most energie efficient way to turn heat into movement (thus electricity?).
Can anybody shed some light on this? (no pun intended)
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
... and placed our solar panels in orbit around the sun rather than in orbit around the earth, that would scale out indefinitely Come on! We just need to plug the wire directly into the sun!Oh, I've gotten over evolved language. I just haven't gotten over sloppy thinking.
Maybe I should though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've been reading and researching renewable energy for some time now. And honestly one of the biggest weaknesses each of these systems has is claiming they are the "magic bullet" to our energy woes.
The fact is one technology will not replace coal fired electricity, just like one technology will not replace oil (and I'm not talking just for vehicles here).
What we need is a more balanced approach combining, solar, wind, biomass, tidal etc... The beauty of combining these technologies into the electrical grid is you can invest less in one particular type and still get the results you want. Diversify is the key.
Germany has already discovered this. They have some towns and villages that leverage a grouping of diverse technologies and produce more power than they require, in turn they sell it back to the grid making the town an energy producer rather than consumer.
Check out these videos on the subject of Germany and renewable resources:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikDjh8tDx8
http://multimedia.boston.com/pub/m/19358244/germany_s_solar_experiment.htm
We have to start working collectively if we are to see any real sustainability in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace
Is there enough material on the face of the earth to construct a Dyson sphere? Oh, and just to ask that question, I had to dig through three layers of ridiculousness. Are you sure you're not after a sci-fi forum?
I didn't suggest we should try to build a Dyson sphere. The point is that we would not run out of space to scale out our energy collection infrastructure. This is not a daydream, it is a practical and feasible plan to implement in the real world, right now, with current technology.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The US is a tad larger than New Jersey. Hell, there are many counties in the Desert West that are much larger than New Jersey.
I know people out East tend to think '20 miles' is a long way, but there are places in the Desert West where 'towns' (meaning two houses and the gas station/store) exist for the sole purpose of providing gasoline so you don't run your tank dry before the next 'town'. When you see a sign saying 'last gas next 100 miles' they mean it.
The US is freaking huge. We are only talking about roughly 830,000 acres of land (200 sites of 4160 acres spread over the entire country would do the whole trick). Compare that with the more than 8 MILLION acres of land that burned in last year's fires in the US.
Solar Thermal is a comparatively 'low impact' power source. You don't need to bring thousands of tons of coal to it annually by strip mining it, you don't have to pump hundreds of thousands gallons of oil, dig up and refine and dispose of nuclear fuel, or drown entire canyon ecologies to build a dam.
Environmentalists generally LOVE Solar Thermal. It is one of the most eco-friendly energy sources around.
They can always use whale oil, too. The demand for that is WAY down from it's peak.
"unfortunately, there are a fair amount of countries that don't have access to the sun. "
Seattle isn't a country
There was a discussion around essentially the same topic, here in /. a couple of months ago:
Molten Salt-Base Solar Power
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Either way, neither of the two are complete solutions like so many want to believe. Relying on the sun for power is not feasible for anything other than base load stuff.
So this unlimited and completely pollution free* power source can only completely provide for the base load of the entire country (if you make zero attempt to solve the problem)? Oh, how terrible!
Nobody pushing for alternative energy is really that attached to the idea of a "complete" solution. It's the nay-sayers who are always harping on any particular weakness of any one technique and saying "well it can't do everything, what's the point?"
It's nice that people are thinking, but the problem is that the government tends to grant subsidies irresponsibly and places too much importance on any one system. The media plays up the importance of biofuels or wind power, then government pork follows and sends science off on a tangent following a single system.
No the problem is that people naturally stick to the status quo unless whatever the new thing is a "complete solution", so it often takes the government, for better or worse, to get people out of their comfort zone. In some cases, for better, like wind power, which is a fantastic source of power in many places (like west Texas where the farms are going up all the time), and is providing an increasing percentage of electricity, without trying to be a "complete solution". This is exactly what you seem to be asking for -- diversity, using appropriate tech where appropriate -- but it's an example of government pork gone bad?
Not that I believe most of them are subsidized; it's apparently fairly profitable to own a wind farm even without government help.
The money should instead be going into research on how to find the best balance of technology.
That makes no sense. The money required to 1) develop alternative energy sources and 2) do the feasibility studies on where and how they can be deployed and 3) actually build them, is vastly more than the amount of money required to take all those feasibility studies that have already been done and decide which tech to deploy where. "finding the best balance of technology" is pointless if you haven't spent the money to develop the tech, no?
We are going to have use coal for a long time, that's inescapable. There is no one solution that is capable of completely supplanting coal. It's going to require efforts in lots of fields like nuclear, geothermal, and solar. Each has its own characteristics, advantages, and draw backs. It's all about finding the right combination.
Coal is not inescapable, it's not the perfect fuel with no drawbacks in theory, it is itself not a "complete solution" in practice. If you're going to put nuclear on the table, then there's your opportunity to completely replace coal right there.
* In operation of course, not during manufacture, but seriously who cares? Our entire society is built on manufacturing, with the commensurate pollution. If they didn't build thermal solar plants, it's not like nothing else would be built. The comparatively minuscule environmental cost of building the plants is just noise compared to the benefits of running them pollution-free for years.
The enemies of Democracy are
Some very big money is being spent right now in the US for these 'passive' systems. Nevada, Arizona, and So. Cal all have big thermal projects they are bankrolling:
http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/
"Arizona Public Service, Arizonaâ(TM)s largest utility, announced plans Thursday for a 280-megawatt solar power plant to be built 70 miles southwest of Phoenix by Spanish company Abengoa Solar"
"Utility giant FPL has filed plans with California regulators to build a $1 billion, 250-megawatt solar power plant in the Mojave Desert. The move marks the first time that a major player â" in this case a Fortune 500 company â" has jumped into the nascent Big Solar market."
"Solel last July signed the world's largest solar power deal when it agreed to supply California utility PG&E (PCG) with 553 megawatts of green electricity to be produced by a massive solar thermal power plant to be built in the Mojave Desert."
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
This estimate for solar power does not include transmission losses, and assumes you can losslessly transmit power from mexico to alaska (which is a location where you couldn't place this power station).
... (high estimate includes a demand growth of 3.5% per year, which is the expected value if energy prices remain constant at higher demand, which is presumably what you want to do, especially since the alternative is letting people freeze)
So in practice, even today, we'd need at least 120% of the stated figure. If all in one plant we'd need 300%.
So you need 12200 square miles for to even start.
Note that this is already bigger than some states. Let's perhaps put this in a better perspective : this would take 0.3% (low estimate) of the surface area of the united states, 1% for the bad estimate.
How long could one do this ? Well in 235 years the entire surface area of the United States would be necessary to generate energy (again : low estimate).
Half of the surface area would be used in 200 years. A small table :
Year - Area Used (low estimate) - (high estimate)
2008 - 0.3 - 1
2055 - 1 - 5
2084 - 2 - 15
2120 - 5 - 50
2141 - 10 - 100
By contrast, energy generation by new generation nuclear power plants will last, with the large growth, over 600 years, with current technology, with thorium reactors, with negligeable surface area used. In that time, they will generate only 500 tons of problematic waste, ie. nothing we can't handle. And if we still don't have fusion power by then, well, then nobody can say we didn't give the scientists as much time as possible to study it.
And obviously, nuclear power works in Alaska too. Alaska receives only 16% of solar energy, so to power alaska you'd need an 8x bigger solar station.
Grids are expensive and security risks. A decentralized power system would be much more economically efficient, more resilient to regular local outages caused by weather storms, and much more competitive in offering consumers lower prices. Grid = Monopoly. It's economically efficient to transport oil and gasoline by tankers and by semi truck to decentralized filling stations.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready. The market certainly won't be ready, won't be competitive, if you are building "super grids". That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents (just like ethanol farmers and processing plants).
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Of course, it begs the question: How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?
;)
When they say '6 to 8 cents per KWh', it generally covers construction, O&M costs. Resources generally abstract out to dollar costs.
Basically, they generally assume you get a loan with a payoff duration of the expected lifespan of the plant. Say 20 years. They figure O&M will cost so much per year, and so many KWh will be produced. Simple division gives you O&M cost per KWh. Then you figure in the annual loan payments*. Divide and you get an expected infrastructure cost for the plant per KWh. Add the two. 6-8 cents per KWh isn't actually that bad. It'd be economical in California, for example, if not quite there for North Dakota(besides the whole 'less sun' thing).
Let's do a bit of comparison with what I think we need more of, nuclear plants.
$1 Billion, 1 Gigawatt plant. 90% load factor. Let's say 4% interest, plant life 40 years.
The interest and capital will be $50 million per year. (4.18M per month)
Random webpage says $50M for Operations
NEI says 1.26 cents per KWh, including fees for eventual disposal and decommisioning.
We can expect our plant to produce about 8B KWh a year. This translates to $100 million O&M per the NEI. I'll use this one.
This all translates to nuclear being around 1.9 cents per KWh. In comparison, I wouldn't say that this would be economical. Even if you knock the nuclear plant down to 20 years, it only increases the cost pre KWh to 3 cents.
*I often use a mortgage calculator that you can punch in duration, interest rate, and amount and it gives you monthly payments. It's intended for houses, but works equally well for cars and billion dollar nuclear plants.
I don't read AC A human right
Why would you want to use earth material to build a Dyson sphere? The sun spews out massive amounts of material all the time, your Dyson sphere would be made from that. You could even use some advanced electromagnetic of gravitational technologies to coax extra material out if the current expulsion rate is too slow for your liking.
http://www.mhall119.com
The development of solar thermal power is of interest to the data center industry, where the push for "green" energy has thus far focused primarily on hydro and wind power, prompting Google and Microsoft to build huge facilities near Northwest dams andf MidWest windmills. Some companies would love to incorporate solar generation to supplement grid power, but photovoltaic doesn't produce enough capacity to make a significant dent in overall data center energy usage. Solar thermal can at least generate "utility-scale" power.
That's probably why Google has invested $10 million in eSolar, a solar thermal startup. The speculation is that Google would like to use solar thermal power in some locations to whittle down the percentage of its data center power bill that comes from coal, which would make it easier for the company to meet its promise of carbon neutrality.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
1)What is the Ohio or Seattle equivalent of 8464 square miles of Southwest desert? Will this work in places that don't have bright, cloudless sunshine most of the year? If so, how many square miles of mirrors will be required?
2)What will be the environmental damage caused by covering the equivalent of 8000+ square miles of desert? All that sunlight not reaching the grass and other low plants, which will destroy the habitat of numerous small animals, etc.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There are many alternative concepts for low- or no-carbon energy in the drawers. Hoewever, most of them still have the status of an unproven technology. They are perceived as being driven mostly by tree-hugging nerds who can't do the math, or mad-scientist type of guys who are desperately fighting for a silly idea.
For some this may be true, for some it certainly is not. But to know which tech belongs to which category, a serios research investment needs to happen.
Now imaginge that a country of the size of the United States would invest just the cost of 1 month worth of Iraq war into the development of alternative energys. A research facility town in a desert, funded with anything they need to prove whatever technology promises to deliver clean energy on a larger scale, and invest what is necessary to solve the problem, or dismiss the technology, could probably do more for the world climate and world economy than most other measures.
The Manhattan project was an example of an must-do project where absolutely anything needed to solve a complex technical problem was done, investing any manpower and money possibly needed to solve the task.
Now think of doing the same, but this time not to build the most destructive weapon on the planet, but to get rid of oil as the primary energy source, lose the handcuffs of oil dependency, and save the climate.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
Not necessarily: We could give monetary incentive to buildings' owners to operate heliostat mirrors on their roofs toward energy company's solar tower (there can be even a competition between various "sun buyers" in single area, a multiple choice for aiming-for-dollars) and homesteads already occupy a lot of land.
Nah. These installations fit in wide open spaces. In the city, building roofs should be covered with smaller generators. All the "monetary incentive" needed is that the buildings could get most of the power for their AC from the sun rather than from the grid. It still wouldn't be free (initial cost + maintenance) but if the price for on the spot electricity generation could be driven lower than grid prices, businesses would be falling over themselves to install them.
No, no, no! We need new Wars. I am getting tired of watching new WW2 movies every few years. Need something fresh and interesting. Hopefully the US will increase their funding of this and other conflicts so we can have a large scale regional war with Iran and Syria; now that could make for some interesting movie epos in the future.
Solar is a near perfect power source requiring minimal systems to exploit it, totally renewable and producing no waste. The fact that people in countries with year-round sunshine are heating their water with gas or electricity is ridiculous. The oil and gas people are exploiting their leverage to maintain their monopoly, regardless of the consequences.
Even in the grey UK there are people heating most of their water with solar. I just wish I had the spare cash to set up my own system.
STP is a very common technology here in Brazil, especially in households that use it to heat water to be used in the shower (replacing our famous electric shower heads). Some industries also use it to pre-heat water that they use in the manufacturing process, saving millions of dollars every year. -vava
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Argument by fear. In the entire history of civilian nuclear power in the US there has been one major accident which didn't kill anyone, this is far better than virtually every other industry in the country. If you were to apply the same irrational argument to other parts of the infrastructure society would grind to a halt.
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure ( such as a train station or airport ). Furthermore if terrorist attacks are an issue then a few nuclear power plants are relatively easy to guard and difficult to attack. It is also unlikely a terrorist organization that had the ability to launch a sufficiently fierce attack would pick a nuclear power plant as a target since there are far more vulnerable sites available.
Would it be possible to build it in the ocean?
What's your point? There's too much infrastructure in place to expect oil to stop being used immediately. It's not like kerosene wiped out the demand for whale oil overnight. It took decades.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
They tried, but thought of the "water peak" and gave up ... much better to discourage consumption by high prices.
meant "peak water"
If this is truly as clean and abundant energy source as it appears to be, transportation of the energy seems not as much of a concern. We're already transporting fossil fuels long distances to produce much of our current energy. Why not at least switch to transporting some energy that's not based on fossil fuels -- like hydrogen or some other form of chemical energy. Just looking at the trade offs, there appear to be huge advantages over our current options.
Once whale oil supplies were low enough, there was nothing but a ban on whaling that stopped it's use. We kept on using every last bit that was produced. I'd imagine oil will be the same way.
We are talking about a gasoline powered car vs a hybrid car vs a nuclear powered car.
A gas car is currently cheaper but we are running out of gas.
A hybrid car can reduce gasoline usage to 1/5 what it is currently. It is more expensive than a gas car.
A nuclear car could run forever but produces really long term toxic waste and is *EXTREMELY* expensive.
So why not 4 hybrid cars and one nuclear car?
Peak power usage is usually during the day (and during the hottest, brightest part of the day- and less when it is overcast). Why not have peak power be solar?
---
Besides, we are approaching step 3 and nuclear replenishment will drop from 3 to 2.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sure, it does... provided we can move the required masses around. And we can, with something like a closed-cycle gas-core nuclear engine that uses hydrogen to cool the core, and then spits it out as exhaust. The hydrogen can't be made radioactive, so the exhaust is totally clean, and I've seen (reusable) designs that'll lift a thousand tons to orbit in one shot.
Use nuclear power when it makes sense (large power-to-mass ratios needed) and solar for the rest.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Energon cubes?
With Pebble Bed reactors, nuclear power has a great future:
:)
1. Yes, but it's easy to store pebbles (they're sealed in graphite, waterproof, and can just be loaded into barrels and put underground. They're also rather small (the size of a tennis ball).
2. Pebble Bed reactors can't melt down. If they get too hot, they generate less heat, resulting in an abandoned reaction stabilising long before thermal damage can occur in the containment
3. Ignorance will always be a problem
4. Hardly. The level of security at nuclear power plants is ridiculously off the scale. Also, with pebble bed reactors, the pebbles are practically useless for making weapons.
Pebble bed reactors seem to be the way forward. I suggest reading about them to see their benefits. It's interesting stuff.
Hmm, how about using the variable power sources like solar and wind to drive pumps to fill hydropower or compressed-air reservoirs. Power can then be drawn from them at a predictable rate. You'd lose some efficiency, but you could just throw a few more square miles at the problem.
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
.50BMG rifles are going to be the next big terrorist thing, thus need to be banned, despite no evidence to support it.
Like manufacturing solar panels is a totally clean affair.
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
We have such a low nuclear power casualty rate in the USA that the steam plant section can be considered more dangerous. Guess what this solar plant uses?
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
As Senator Kennedy demonstrated with the proposed wind farm in his area, this can affect renewable power as well. At least a nuclear plant is relatively small.
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
As compared to what? Looking world wide, I think that terrorists have attacked nuclear plants approximately 0 times. On the other hand, there are dozens of attacks on planes, hundreds against places like malls, restraunts, and schools.
That's like saying that
I don't read AC A human right
It does if you use the more recent usage of the term, which means the statement invites a further, obvious question.
Aaah pedantry. Lovely stuff.
So is China, North Korea, Iran, and every other country.
Just to make something even clearer: you should read the article and learn something before recycling canned opinions.
An essential feature of solar thermal power is that it easily and efficiently stores solar energy directly as heat. From the article:
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Before criticizing that type of technology, you really should read the article, you know. You might learn a thing or two.
RTFA, never! I like my /. bareback!
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
The problem (if you could call it that) isn't so much lack of available sources of energy. Allegedly, there is enough wind energy in South Dakota also to power the country if South Dakota was fully built out with wind turbines.
The problem is that transmission lines to move the power cost about $300,000 a mile, plus the cost of substations and transformers. It's not a stretch of the imagination to say that such an upgrade to the system would cost trillions of dollars.
Economics say that the closer power is produced to where it is consumed, the cheaper it actually is. Which is why covering New Mexico with these is a ludicrous proposition and not worth investigating. I'm wondering if it'll work in the Chicagoland metropolitan area first and foremost, and if the costs work out for such a plant to be built.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
beside ye olde solar power plant, or nearby, a hydrogen generation plant. When the power isn't being used, it can be used to create hydrogen from a local source of water. The hydrogen can then be shipped to other places, or even used later in the day to create power when the sun is out.
.. maybe at Niagara falls. When demand is low, they pump water up to a large lake, so that later they have all that potential energy they can draw upon if necessary. I could have the details wrong.
I seem to recall a similar idea with hydro power
Or perhaps industry would spring up around these places, which would mean the power wouldn't have to be shipped as far. I know the major internet players are currently building new DCs close to power, even if they're out of the way of the normal big cities, this could be another facility to offer cheap power. Combine it with the previous idea (hydrogen power plant) and you'd, potentially, have a very self reliant power center.
Another point I'd add to your note is that the smaller, poorer nations shouldn't just "allow the rich nations to come in and setup the plants". They should be working to develop these resources (perhaps with public/private financing) for themselves, so that the poorer nations actually get something out of it, instead of seeing all the money/jobs going to a rich nation (read: the US). Having just finished reading a book about the role of Americans in oil/resource development in South America, I'd like to see small nations develop their own natural resources, and actually benefit from them. In this case, having a clear sky and lots of sunlight is a national resource that some other countries don't have.
$0.02 CDN
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
No, I am NOT, although I can see how you would come to that conclusion if you have problems with English comprehension.
What I am saying here is that THESE designs (see the word above?) are sometimes useful when there is not full sun; in this case, when the sun is partially obscured by clouds. However, some reflector-collector designs are NOT useful on cloudy days; they do not have enough reflector area to being the collector up to a useful temperature.
Meanwhile, the current PV panels have MORE problems; they don't produce current when it's cloudy OR when they are partially shaded.
Hope this helps.
Nuclear is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. There's still a few major issues I see with nuclear:These problems are all addressed in other comments. The most salient point is that we need to use breeder reactors to reprocess the fuel, which can save us around least two orders of magnitude of efficiency, since nuclear fuel is only about 1% used in modern reactor designs; the reprocessed fuel is only a significant problem for three to five hundred years, totally solvable on a human timescale if you don't put the storage facility someplace as retarded as Yucca.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
1) Nooclear power is 2 cents a kilowatt. 2) The dumbass environmental nazi weenies will never allow a 8464 square mile chunk of land for it. "Oh, those poor little 'sensitive' (read: non-existent) species won't have any nesting grounds."
Well, if you like doom and gloom, there's the theory that once the arctic ice melts the conveyor will shut down, ocean levels will rise, evaporation will increase, and we'll have global clouds leading to global cooling leading to blizzards which will basically eliminate solar output for years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, you'd need 8464 (92 * 92) different plants 1 square mile each. Not all parts of the country are as suitable as the desert areas are, so you'd need even more if some were going to be in the cloudier areas.
Ok so here is the difficulty that the world is having. We want cheap renewable energy so bad that we jump on the band wagon with anything we think might work. Well here's a news flash: NOTHING IS FREE!! I am an Electrical Engineer and I work in the field of Power Systems. In Colorado we have enough wind banks to take care of over 30% of our power consumption if they are all running. Well there is a problem with that...wind DIES occasionally. So unless you want your lights to flicker all day and your computer to constantly shut down because it can't stay on with the power fluctuations, we have to put in other sources of power. Coal and Nuclear can't be turned on and off that fast, so really the only solution is natural gas turbines. These are far more expensive than coal running around $55/MWh. So yeah wind and this new solar thermal are down as low as 6 cents. But guess what happens when a cloud comes over. Either your lights flicker or another generator has to come on to compensate. I was discussing this problem with a dispatcher in the local power company. He said that while wind power was running about $6/MWh, it cost them a total of 1.2 Million dollars in JANUARY to compensate for wind lost. That is 1 month worth of cost. So here is the deal, if you want to go around proclaiming that you have solved all the world's problems with a $0.06/MWh generator, you have to include the $1.2M/month cost that comes along with it. If you don't understand the complexity of the power generation industry then don't pretend like you do.
If you're constructing a Dyson sphere, why on Earth (HJARF!) would you bother to haul the building materials up out of Earth's gravity well? Off the top of my head, I have no idea if there's enough asteroid material to build a Dyson sphere at roughly the Earth's orbit. But there's almost certainly enough to build a Niven ring, and by the time we reach that point we could probably start dismantling the outer planets if necessary...
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Actually, based on some off the cuff calculations...
.2 sq miles.
Current solar acreage is probably small. A very large solar plant takes
http://www.metaefficient.com/news/north-americas-largest-solar-electric-plant-in-switched-on.html
http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi
Electric Plant
It looks like electric plants maybe about 75 acres to 170 acres.
(various google "electric plant acres" results.
Say 125 acres average.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/ipp/ipp_sum.html
350mw per plant (19,300mw/55 plants)
604,514 = 1727 electric plants currently
This equates to roughly 300 square miles of electrical plants currently. I'm not sure if the gov site includes dams, windfarms, and nukes. I know windfarms get pretty big (google: 40000-Acre Wind Farm (~62 sq miles), 2000 turbines over 200000 acres (~310 sq miles), Indian Mesa wind farm situated on 34000 acres in West Texas).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Grid = monopoly? Ever heard about that worldwide internet grid called "intarweb"?
Maybe you could have both. What's wrong with having a decentralized system, as you've mentioned, that can also send and receive or buy and sell or whatever you want to call it from a centralized system? Obviously, you'd need to have rules, but maybe some sort of hybrid system (in terms of centralization) would be the most effective and stable. Decentralization comes with negatives, too, and those could be mitigated by still having "access" to some sort of power network.
Just an idea
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
or we could just put solar cells on the roofs of buildings...
As for these big mirrors, deserts have plenty of empty space, and could probably use a bit if shade. In inhabited areas this is going to be a bigger problem. There, solar cells are probably easier: simply cover every roof with them, and you've got plenty of energy without sacrifing any space.
Turns out wikipedia even has a page about solar shingles.
(I am French, I can add to that)
In France, we haven't been building new nuclear powerplants for about 10 years. The oldest ones in production should have been taken out of the grid already but their lifetime is "extended" (without any concern for security...). And we regularly have incidents in those plants, it's just the media don't talk about that.
Nuclear power is not a long-term solution, we'll run out of Uranium too. It's also dangerous. And guess where the Uranium is coming from? Yeah you got it, Africa... Nobody talks about the human cost of Uranium extraction in African mines, where workers dwell without protection. And how about the dictators of those countries we help maintain in power in exchange for the Uranium? It's dirty business just like fuel...
Why do you think it would cost less than the iraq war? Our current energy infrastructure cost trillions of dollars to build, and solar thermal would be more expensive. By comparison the Iraq war has not cost a trillion (unless you do a lot of hand waving and use funny numbers).
This whole article is a lot of nonsesne. 92 miles square is 8464 square miles. The article does not mention the installed cost of such a system, but it's probably tens of trillions of dollars. More if you factor in the need to store energy overnight and on overcast days.
He mentions that the price could drop to $.08 per kwh if a plant was larger than 3 gigawats (he doesn't mention if this number is electrical or if it is thermal, but it's probably electrical). That is one freaking huge solar power station (the largest to date is a couple hundred megawats). Is it even possible to build one that big?
Very impressive. Now check out Sweden here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union
c++;
Before reading the fine article, I thought it would be a PR piece for Ausra.
If you read the stuff at their website, http://ausra.com/, they answer a lot of the questions that have been, and doubtless will be asked here;
It's possible to store thermal energy and use it to produce electricity at night.
Some places do receive more sunlight than others, and plants built in those places would be more efficient.
They have a nice PDF that shows (among other things) the normal solar radiation for different areas - plants work better in deserts than in river valleys, but there are plenty of places you can build them that are cost effective.
Ausra isn't vaporware - they already build a plant in Australia, and they are building one in southern California.
The current plant is cost competitive with scrubbed coal, and future plants are supposed to be on par with unscrubbed coal plants.
That last may be hype, but at the very least they can already produce electricity for less than 12 cents a kilowatt, and cutting that in half doesn't seem unreasonable.
Even so, at best these kinds of plants will only supplant oil and coal burning electric plants.
We're still going to burn oil in our cars, home heaters, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Ausra, but most of my information about them comes from them, or their press releases, so take it with a grain of salt.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
We don't have breeder reactors. We're not likely to anytime soon. This solar tech is far more viable near-term for the following reasons:
1) It's much simpler to build and maintain.
2) It doesn't use radioactive materials that may someday in the future only be toxic for 300 years, but currently is toxic for thousands of years. (As far as I'm concerned, anything that's still toxic to my descendants 300 years hence is still a problem.)
What would YOU do with the waste, even taking as a given that we'll reduce the toxicity time-frame to 300 years? You still have to put it SOMEWHERE. Bear in mind that locations far removed from human populations will be fewer and fewer as our population increases exponentially.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
One of the most concise counterpoints in this topic, yet here I sit, cursed with 10 mod points, unable to use them since I've already posted... drat.
That may soon be true, if not in the way you imagine. As the cost of oil continues its inevitable climb upward (finite supply + infinite demand == higher prices), alternative power sources will become competitive and eventually, much cheaper than oil.
That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents
And yet massive subsidies were what brought the oil industry's infrastructure to where it is today. I don't see why the same mechanism that got one thing accomplished couldn't be used to get another thing accomplished as well. Sometimes you simply need to get the job done, even if it is expensive and inefficient to do it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Um, rather than pumping water up above the dam ( and where would you get this water if not from the river below the dam which is fed by the reservoir behind the dam itself? ) why not just shut the water flow through the turbines down, and let the river water build up naturally above the dam when there is such an overabundant supply of energy that it makes sense to store it? I mean I'd be suprised if hydroelectric plants don't already run themselves at max capacity only at peak energy use hours when there is insufficient water to run at full power output 24x7. Although likely dams are built to be run at peak 24x7 since this minimizes the size of the reservoir behind the dam and the area that must be flooded. Excess flow over and above that which is reliable 24x7 goes over the top.
...
nuclear cant be built in time to address climate change. nuclear has security risks, nuclear has sever accident risks (small chance but major potential problem). Nuclear is historically way more expensive than claimed. Nuclear has waste storage costs and transport security costs. Nuclear has major anti-terrorist security costs, and also increases the threat of proliferation of nuclear tech. nuclear needs access to large water supplies nearby and is by nature centralised.
None of this is true of wind or solar. I fail to see why solar cannot provide our energy needs. Are you saying there is not enough solar energy falling on the earth?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
If you look at the real numbers NEI tends to be off by an order of 10 or more. Reactors are off line, or should be off line, about 25% of the time. Their reactor fuel costs are very outdated (remember it takes oil to dig things out of the ground & transport them half way around the world and oil has gone way up and will continue to go up). Another big hole in NEI's numbers is their assumption that they will never pay for any risk and that that rick will be paid for by the taxpayers. Risk in terms of insurance, security, emergency services, disposal (their assumption for disposal is based strictly on the cost of hauling the waste to the dump, oh wait the cost of oil to haul the waste has gone way up too). It just goes on and on. The real cost of nuc power is more like 17 to 23 cents per kWh NEI is really just a lobbying group and yes I have seen their lobbyist at DC events)
That isn't really a significant concern. There's plenty of empty, sun-drenched space in the desert that nobody wants to use for anything else.
Space-based solar, on the other hand, suffers from a much bigger problem: the cost of launching material into orbit is so outrageously high that space-based solar won't be economically feasible until a major breakthrough (say, a working space elevator) is achieved. And even then -- say, for the sake of argument, that we found a way to launch satellites into orbit for free -- it's not clear to me that the costs of simply maintaining a large fleet of solar power satellites in their orbits wouldn't be significant. After all the analysis, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to harvest solar power on the ground. Yes, you have to harvest more sunlight since its intensity has been reduced by the atmosphere, but on the plus side, when something breaks it's a lot easier to fix it. You also don't have to worry about your power plant accidentally de-orbiting and landing on someone's house...
If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind
I think that's a great plan for the 23rd century, but we need a plan that will get us through the 21st and 22nd intact, first.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Who said anything about solar panels? The article is about solar thermal power, which is a completely different technology.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I am no scientist, however I wonder if there may be a way to run a Solar plant in tandem with an existent Thermoelectric plant, so that it burns oil or diesel only half the time (nighttime or peak usage times)?
No sig for the moment.
Well, why limit yourself to Dyson Spheres when it is possible that intelligence might take another route ... I recently read this book called accelerando (http://www.amazon.com/Accelerando-Charles-Stross/dp/0441012841 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel)) which was in my opinion slightly realistic at trying to protray a future of humanity (though optimistic to be sure).
Instead of Dyson spheres the Author says that Martoshika brains may be the step that intelligence takes in order to use as much energy as possible for itself. I get the feeling that that might indeed be a probable future though a bleak one.
blog plug -> The Darker Side of Light
For the last time:
You are NOT a taxpayer.
YOU ARE A CITIZEN.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
"2. Pebble Bed reactors can't melt down. If they get too hot, they generate less heat, resulting in an abandoned reaction stabilising long before thermal damage can occur in the containment"
Pebble bed reactors certinally can melt down. It is all a question of design. The vast majority of all reactor designs employ a negative temperature coefficient of reacitvity to achieve stability. That means that as the core gets hotter, the rate of reaction decreases. This is even true of plain old light water reactors. The trick is to design the plant so that heat generated by the nuclear reaction can be dissipated through natural convection in the event of a coolant failure. Obviously, it is possible and even easy to do this with any type of stable reactor design. All modern reactor designs achieve this.
"1. Yes, but it's easy to store pebbles (they're sealed in graphite, waterproof, and can just be loaded into barrels and put underground. They're also rather small (the size of a tennis ball)."
This same "feature" makes it impossible to reprocess spent fuel from these reactors. That means that high level waste will remain radioactive for thousands of years, and less total power will be produced with a given ammount of uranium.
If you like wacky reactor designs, look into molten salt reactors for safety and the ability reprocess spent fuel cheaply and easly, or fast reactors for their ability to use U238 to generate power. Pebble bed reactors are a waste of time and money.
Sun lovers must see this
http://www.psa.es/webeng/techrep/techent.html
I think we've got a lot of people around here that have never been to the southwest. 10k square miles of available space is most certainly NOT the problem. The truth is that many of the areas that are ideal for solar are very marginal lands due to the scorching heat and lack of water. I'm not entirely up on land prices, but given that I paid $1200/acre for some very nicely treed land in southern CO, I'd guess $400/acre for parched desert isn't a bad place to start. That puts the purchase price at under $4B for the land, or about as much as the US spends on oil in 2 days. (based on 20M bbl/day stat from herehttp://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html)
Transmission of the generated power and political will are the problems, not availability of land.
I am a progressive humanist devoted to social justice. Therefore I am for any technology developments that enable an increase in energy consumption for low income people around the world. Currently, access to high levels of personal energy consumption is really only available to rich westerners. Technology like this could change that.
Increased consumption enabled by technology is a more moral goal than conservation.
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity.
I agree the nuclear waste problem is largely artificial. Between breeder reactors and processing solutions, nuclear waste is a largely overblown concern.
Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Let's stay mostly on topic here. The coming generation of cheap photovoltaic cells does not make use of much in the way of toxic chemicals that cannot be recycled. The molten salts proposed by posters here are not waste products at all, but reusable parts of the system and easily recycled into another such. They are a non issue.
Argument by fear.
The formal name of this fallacy is "appeal to consequences" I believe. But you're correct. There is no problem with nuclear safety provided it is regulated well enough that safety is considered a serious concern. That said, there is still some real danger. Take a look at the recent events in Canada for example, where the regulatory body was completely overruled by the politicos of the day in favor of ignoring safety concerns because of economic pressure from the industry heavyweights. Power has always been big business, which leads to corruption of the government, which leads to safety taking a back seat to profit.
Rather than downplaying the risks, I think it is more useful to keep them in the forefront of the public consciousness and work towards global standards and regulation such that all power generation designs should be subject to thorough and open review. Nuclear power can be hazardous (as can coal, etc.). We need to make sure there are effective citizen watchdogs to correct for industry's mercenary decision making.
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
You're mostly correct, IMHO. I'd say, however, that making power generation safe enough and attractive enough such that people don't mind it being in their backyard is a worthwhile goal. I also think the technical benefits of distributed power generation are underplayed, especially given the problems we have with reliable distribution in adverse conditions. I think it is reasonable to start on the high end and sell commercial businesses on the benefits of their own generation for reliability and cost and then trickle it down to consumer homes. I'd point to the thermal pumps just taking off to leverage flooded underground mines as a great example. A mediocre investment that can insure your power costs go down, regardless of the market changes and which insulate you from power failures, is "green" as a consumer selling point and for the quality of the system makes a whole lot of sense. I think it is important that we don't let big, consolidated power plants of any sort eclipse this sort of development.
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure
You're right in your points, but I think you miss the point. Terrorism, does not always mean airliners. It can mean a few employees that decide to drove off with enough material to do some real damage. That said, terrorism concerns are hugely overblown. Deaths hastened by particulates from fossil fuel plants probably kill more people than all the terrorists in the world will ever manage.
In short, I agree that nuclear should not be ignored, especially for the new small sca
Well, in the case we'd have plenty of hydroelectric ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Forget subsidizing this with tax dollars. I have a few bucks to invest. Let me buy some stock. Or how about some energy bonds? The US sold war bonds during WWII, let us buy Alternative Energy Bonds for investing in solar and geo and fuel cells.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I 100s of millions , no where near trillion.
It is actually pretty simple to build, doesn't require any new materials, and is simple to maintain.
"More if you factor in the need to store energy overnight and on overcast days."
It's not battery storage, it's hot liquid storage in tanks. Which is released into the turbines on demand.
An area the size of a football field will produce 300 MWatts at the beginning. Cloudy days don't impact this things as much as you would think.
This is NOT solar panels.
About 5 months ago I did a lot of research into this technologies, it looks very promising.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just wondering how much energy a square mile (cubed mile?) of mice on treadmills would generate. This would work well for large cities like NY, LA and Houston where the mice are decidely bigger and in greater supply.
Solar and wind are way more expensive than the hippies claim.
nuclear has security risks Nuclear has major anti-terrorist security costs and also increases the threat of proliferation of nuclear tech. These are all the same thing rephrased.RTFA. Your main objection, is the main point of the article. The critical advantage is the storage of energy in heat (for hours), that eliminates fluctuations. This is the main advantage touted in the article.
Plus these tend to be built in the desert where clouds are a rarity. The supply curve a solar thermal system will closely follow the demand curve of users going about their day.
This is a stable, consistent source of clean energy to add to the grid.
Well, here's an example why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses_Hydro-Electric_Dam
Why does it have to scale out indefinitely? Or is there some requirement that any alternative energy source must meet 100% of demand to be viable? And why does this need to be centralised or use otherwise open land? I'm not that enamoured of my roof that I'd begrudge having some of it covered by panels. Come up with a storage method that is small enough to fit into a small shed and efficient enough to store enough power to meet my needs overnight and I'd be largely off the grid.
Only if the asteroids are made of scrith. Niven's ringworld is a badass idea, don't get me wrong, but it might as well be made of unobtanium for all it's practicality right now.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
While usage wins in the end, contesting "recent" trends is part of usage, as well, particularly when what at stake is a phrase and not just a single term. The more recent use of the term is itself
When there are different schools of usage, there's a sociolinguistic aspect to the critique. Someone who uses "beg the question" incorrect betrays the weaknesses in their educational background.
Besides, most of the "usage rules" folk I know wince when the current US president pronounces "nuclear" the way he does. Seems a little arbitrary, don't you think?
Except that the ring is not passively stable and to compound that difficulty there is no known material that could handle the stress involved.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Now hopefully some moderators who AREN'T crippled by dementia will come along, and mod your comment "flamebait". What in the the flying fuck does the Iraq war have to do with solar power?
For a start, "Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, says the Iraq war has cost $3 trillion so far." http://3trillion.org/ I've personally built a prototype of a solar concentrator made from aluminized mylar. My plan was to store thermal energy in a volume of water as a thermal-mass reservoir. Low-cost insulation is one of the materials innovation we need, but it appears to be a very good idea to me. Solar arrays can very inexpensive and generate a great deal of energy. Also, there are new high-energy photovoltaics available. Also, there are incredible savings to be made by consuming less energy. Investing in freight and commuter rails can save a great deal of energy. Recovering the energy from vehicle braking and saving the energy used at stop-lights. Anyway, your point of view patently crazy, ethnically-alienated, and anti-social for another reason. The incredible suffering and injustice of the Iraq war has lots of terrible effects which are more difficult for an accountant to quantify. You are seriously wrong.
Freedom is free.
We have a pretty efficient way of transporting energy across the globe with hydrocarbons. We only need to create an infrastructure of some other material (did someone say hydrogen?) that we can produce with the thermal power and then tranport it to the place where energy is needed. It's merely a question of a) engineering and b) politics I think it's obvious which one is the bigger hurdle.
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One problem that is neglected is that he mentions putting the plants in the Southwest. Last I heard, people on the East Coast start their day as many as 3 hours before the sun rises in the southwest.
Wait - what? What the hell is "an oragutan task"?
oh. Interesting mental image though.
-- "Oh. This guy again."
I did read the article. I maybe did not stress enough that my main point was that there are always hidden costs that they don't tell you about in the article. So yes I realize that the disadvantage I mentioned is not applicable to the solution in the article, but there are always hidden costs. So it is a little premature to say that this will "save our species" without having taken these kinds of things into account. I apologize for not making my point clear enough.
>eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape.
Very eventually. But in the meantime it would give us power, and replace far uglier and more environmentally destructive power sources.
Having so many solar collectors that we're running out of space is what is called a "high class problem". A nice problem to have.
>If we could build such
That's the kicker, isn't it? If you think people are freaked out by nuclear power, try telling them that there will be satellites raining down microwave energy to power the world. Facts don't matter when the general population is uninformed and afraid of something. This is politically very unlikely to fly, kind of like the Space Shuttle.
We're not good enough as a civilization to pull something like this off, and won't be for a long time.
I know the article mentions using this in the middle latitudes where temperatures are pretty warm, and bright, sunny days are pretty common, but I wonder how well this would work in more northern climates? For example, I'm a couple hundred miles south of the arctic circle, and I can't help but think that 18+ hours of daylight would make for a heck of a solar thermal plant, even if the air temperatures aren't quite what they are in the Nevada desert. If you are concentrating solar energy on a boiler, does ambient air temperature make that much of a difference? Of course in the winter, with 18+ hours of darkness, it would be kind of useless so maybe it's not such a great idea up here, after all... ;)
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If it scales out indefinitely, we can use it as the power source for the earth, without having to clutter up the landscape with small scale enterprises. We can bring the promise of custom fabrication to everyone on earth, and push centralization out from the manufacturing level to the resource gathering level.
I expect this will be the engineering project that unifies the people of the earth, similar to the railroads and highways that were the foundation of many nations both ancient and modern. The creation and maintenance of such a project is a fitting purpose for a world government. If it's not already underway by the time I'm in my late 40s, I intend to make this my political platform and try to organize it myself. Beats smelling the roses.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'm both. At least, that's what my paycheck says. When I'm funding something, I'm a taxpayer. When I'm voting on something, I'm a citizen. Seems about right.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Talk about global warming! Could you imagine how hot the Earth would be if we collected all the energy from a Dyson Shpere and sent it to earth. The Earth would actually be hotter then the sun. Heck with the Earth the whole inside of the Sphere would bake.
Even with a small scale system you are in effect adding surface are to the Earth and causing it to collect more solar energy.
It will be a LONG time before we run out of surface area on Earth and need to put collector panels in space. Would be cheaper to lfoat the pannels on barges in the ocean then to put them in space. Even if the floating pannels need to be 10X larger.
RTFA first and then you won't think this is +4 interesting.
You bring up an interesting point... If solar power (and other renewable energy sources) are truly as cheap and effective as supporters say they are, then why aren't we using them?
This comment not directed at parent - it's to the world in general: Just shut up and do it already!
If it works so well, why aren't you already paying $0 for your energy bills?!? Here: BUY SOME! Install them, and then (and only then), come back to slashdot and tell us how well they work, and how you don't pay anything for electricity anymore!
I understand our concern about the larger issue of how "everyone else" gets their energy. The discussion about large-scale renewable energy sources is an important and worthy conversation. But what better way to further that goal than to be an example of how this can succeed by just doing it for yourself?
I'm going to price out some solar panels for my house and see if I can make this work right now. In fact, if it *does* work out, maybe I'll look into buying a patch of land and installing a bunch of solar panels and selling the energy. But here's my concern: I'm not the first person to have thought of this. And solar panels aren't exactly a new invention. So why don't we see a bunch of little, private wind and/or solar energy farms? Is it because it doesn't work on a small scale, but does work on a larger scale? I don't buy that - the relationship between the amount of energy collected and the most significant resource that solar energy collection requires (land) is perfectly linear: One 10x10 solar panel optimally collects x KW/h of energy. y 10x10 solar panels optimally collect x*y KW/h of energy. If it's going to work on a large scale, it *must* necessarily also work on all smaller scales.
Like I said, I'm going to look into doing it for myself, but my suspicion is that the reason we're not all already doing this is because it just doesn't work.
The "base load/peak load" thing is a talking point, it's something that people are paid to feed to other people in hopes of creating a self-replicating meme like ladder stickers or the McDonalds coffee spill.
The person you've criticized may be an "innocent" victim of such a meme (aka, a chump) or a paid shill, or even a free agent attempting to protect his oil investments.
But seriously, it doesn't matter if he reads the article or not, he's either brainwashed or corrupt, like most oil shills are these days. The times when one could characterise anti-environmentalists as good people who are merely misinformed (that is, people who can be persuaded of their errors by revealing facts) are long over.
Always remember after shutdown a nuclear plant will put out about 10% of the heat it was producing at shutdown due to the decay of short lived isotopes. So you need a safe way to remove this heat for about 24 hours or the whole thing overheats and destroys itself. Still we need nuclear power. Compared to the long term damage of coal burning, it is a lot better to use nuclear. Three mile island was only an economic loss, not a significant health hazard. Finally starvation is beginning due to hydrocarbon based food production getting more expensive. We are on the Titanic and have already hit the iceberg. There are not enough lifeboats. Just check the CIA web site for birth rates and average age. So enjoy the music and your late night dinner cause the ship is going down.
"unfortunately, there are a fair amount of countries that don't have access to the sun."
Sadly one of the largest countries in the world (China) only gets about 90% of the sun per square footage of any other nation...on a good day.
With regard to Transferring energy. Don't Bother.
If its built in Africa, Keep it in Africa. It can jump start their economy.
Most other nations can do there own thing, or share with direct neighbors.
Europe... can find other means. there are lots to choose from.
That would be 92x92 miles or 8464sq miles.
For comparison Yellow National park is "only" 3472sq miles.
So by undertaking the largest construction project ever and cover over that much area we can power the US with concentrated solar power.
I can only imagine the environmental impact statement required for such a project.
What's the backup plan for the cloudy days? Tucson,AZ has about 89 of them per year. Lots of local backup required.
All that power generation in one area creates a transmission problem as well.
I'd rather see a Pebble Bed Reactors or some other relatively clean nuclear power with plants spread around the the country.
Here's another thought with centralized power, centralized damage could take the whole thing off line. A ripe target prior to an invasion/attack or just to make us spend the money to build it again. Nope, while I'm not opposed to solar power, this massive project is just plain stupid.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
The cost of a solar power plant should be dominated by capital expenses. So what lifetime are they assuming to come up with that 6 to 8 cents/KWH? And what interest rate on the construction bonds? It seems a more realistic comparison would be in terms of cost per peak capacity, or else cost per average capacity (averaged over a year, including bad weather as well as nights).
that only 1 or 2% of global power needs are met by solar power at current time! Whereas, power generation techniques such as nuclear, which my hippie buddy Zed assures me are "bad" and will "be totally like Chernoble, like booom man," is account for some 20 odd percent of global power generation and is being expanded in many countries! Some places use nuclear almost entirely!
Apparently a crazy sect of cultists called "scientists" (who I believe live in California and are led by Tom Cruise) are contradicting the knowledgeable and sagely hippies and spreading lies about how nuclear power is actually safe when done right, and waste can be stored safely at Yucca mountain for some 10,000 years. Furthermore, they suggest that spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed so that it will have a significantly shorter half life, on the order of a few hundred years. I think we can safely ignore these crackpots, with their "Phd's" and other cultish paraphernalia, and listen to my friend Zed who works at greenpeace.
These same crazy scientists in an effort to derail solar panel have pointed out some problems with Zed's plans to save the world. Before we can deploy solar power plants of any size, we must address these obstacles. I am not familiar with them myself, as I don't get outside much, but I read about them on wikipedia. They are called:
1. Night time.
2. Clouds.
"Night time", judging by it's title, seems to be some kind of dark temporal force preventing the rays of the sun or "Sol" from reaching the earth. I suspect this does not exist, it even sounds like something out of a science fiction story. If it does exist, I am confident that if we set our best space/time physicists to work on it, we can eradicate this shadowy nemesis.
I'm not sure what clouds are, but according to wikipedia they are "a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body."
I don't know about you, but this sounds like an unlikely scenario to me. I mean, water "floating in the atmosphere." Water doesn't float in the atmosphere! It stays securely packed in mountain dew bottles. I'm sure we can ignore these hypothetical "cloud" problems when building our solar panels, and they will not cause any problems.
In any case, let's ignore these so called "logistical problems" (a term that sounds like cult speak to me!) and deploy solar power globally. Zed assures me that the primary problems facing global power right now is a lack of positive thinking.
So what, pray tell, are you going to use to collect this material that is spewed out from the Sun at temperatures so high that it's in plasma form?
And I ask again: Are you sure you're in the right place? This is a news site, sci-fi is down the hall.
I hate printers.
Who said anything about solar panels? The article is about solar thermal power, which is a completely different technology.
Not even making aluminum is absolutely clean. As it's a heat plant, it's probably got about 60% of it's infrastructure in common with a nuclear plant anyways.
I don't read AC A human right
Lots of people are asking about the problems of energy storage. The way forward is really very simple.
There are two fundamental assumptions, one is long term - any non-renewable energy source will eventually run out. The other is immediate - nobody wants to rebuild the massive infrastructure that already exists.
In terms of our expected spcies life cycle on this planet, solar is an obvious candidate. But what do we do when the sun is obscured (by the earth/clouds/smog etc.)? The answer lies in the other energy infrastructure that we already have, OIL! Make oil while the sun shines. We don't have to retool an enormous energy delivery infrastructure, we don't have to develop radical new concepts in energy use. We capitalize on the already existing infrastructure and we tap into the long term energy resource that is solar.
If new technologies come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete and negate the necessity of oil pipe lines and electric transmission lines then, cool. But, until then we use the investment we have already made in the energy infrastructure by delivering sustainable solar energy in the form of an already functional an usefull energy commodity.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
What about all the poor aliens we will be blinding.
As if we could find 8500 square miles of sunny area that isn't a) already filled with people or b) the environmentalists wouldn't go apeshit over the idea of paving it with a solar station.
We're most likely not doing it because the people invested in making something like that happen are more invested on Oil Dollars.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Yeah, we should cover the deserts with solar reflectors, to hell with the endangered desert turtles. We need more power!
Well if you RTFA, why did you say:
"So yeah wind and this new solar thermal are down as low as 6 cents. But guess what happens when a cloud comes over. Either your lights flicker or another generator has to come on to compensate."
It is not just a case of being unclear what your point was, you directly contradict the main points of the article, and show that you didn't understand the benefits of the technology.
Certainly this is pie is the sky when it comes "save our species" BS. That doesn't change the fact that this is a very useful, consistent stable power generation technology, and your objections to it are primarily targeted at weaknesses it doesn't have.
Actually weaknesses would be needing to locate in near perpetual sunny areas (deserts) and the transmission costs from those areas.
Are you kidding?!?!?
You can literally travel portions of the West/Southwest for HUNDREDS of miles and see HOT SUNNY DESERT SAND.
I just bought solar panels and had them installed on my roof. If you have the means, and live in a sunny area, I don't see why you wouldn't do this.
A couple notes (I don't know if these are California specific or not): You are not allowed to install solar panels that would generate significantly more than 100% of your average usage. I don't think the state wants everyone to turn their own houses into little power-plants.
Also, for those interested... You only pay a power bill once at the end of the year. If you have generated more power than you've used, you don't get paid. Your balance is wiped clean. If you have used more than you've generated, than you pay the difference. So, unless your charitable (and some people are), there's not much point in straying too far above 100% anyways.
I was worried about buying technology now, thinking that there would be all these cool advances in a couple of years. What I learned is that advances in home PV systems is generally efficiency. Meaning that a smaller installation would yield the same power, and possibly for cheaper. But since I have roof-space to spare, and was willing to pay todays prices, I pulled the trigger. And Iâ(TM)m happy I did!
Now to buy a plug-in car...
>The problem then becomes one of supply -
>how do you get the Solar Thermal riches of
>the Sahara up to Europe without massive
>power losses.
That is the best point I have seen in this thread, which otherwise has been filled with people who don't seem to understand that the reason that solar power isn't widely deployed is that there are real problems with scaling it up, that may not be solvable.
Power lines are just copper and they have a lot of resistance, which means that we lose a lot of power over distance.
Superconductors are the solution to this problem. However, currently the only superconductors we have require that they be cooled to work... and cooling costs more energy than you lose through resistance on the line anyway, and often presents environmental problems.
So, can we develop room temperature superconductors? Maybe someday, but who knows when? 50? 100 years from now? 500? Maybe never, it might be impossible to have a room temperature superconductor. Unfortunately our energy and environmental problems aren't going to wait for this technology to appear.
I don't even know where to begin taking apart your post, but it's pretty absurd top to bottom.
You are saying, among other things, that:
1. Driving a 100,000 lb truck is a more efficient way to transport electricity than a 145,000 V+ three phase line.
2. That the current electrical grid was designed and built not with sound engineering and economic principles in mind, but as a way to extract subsidies while laying out real dollars and doing real work.
3. That smaller plants are more efficient, nevermind the volumetric power production vs the surface area ambient losses thing.
4. That smaller isolated grids would be more reliable than what we have now.
I'm not sure what rag you've been reading, but it wasn't written by competent, knowledgable adults who know what the hell is going on.
Incidentally, there 'national grid' is comprised of a great many smaller grids that are interconnected for reliability. Relaying protection schemes are generally sufficient to prevent massive outages, but as that huge blackout showed us a while ago, it breaks down occasionally.
The system now generally provides a great deal of reliability, but as we've seen, it occasionally bites us in the ass with a massive blackout.
What you didn't hear about was the hundreds of local or state blackouts that would have occured if you had the smaller independant grids like you envision.
Now I've got nothing against concentrated solar power or any number of technologies, but it helps to have a decent grasp on what's going on if you're going to advocate one thing or another.
I work in the power generation business. Please feel free to ask any specific questions you would like answered.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years"
Hundreds, not hundreds of thousands.
"* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty"
That's just a straw man.
"* NIMBY (not in my back yard)"
This will apply to solar.
"
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
"
haha, I can't believe you said that. ANother Straw Man.
"Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners."
Accept, of course history with the US nuclear program shows a different picture.
These solar collectors are cool, and assuming they can ship the power through the existing grid as they claim, there fantastic, we should go forward now.
Let's not spread lies about the Nuclear industry, mmkay?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Some people use it as a shorthand for:
"This seem to be begging for me to ask ... "
Is that really so very wrong?
Never fear, though: While there are plenty of applied physics people being frustrated out of this field as is, investment capital companies are more than happy to provide rewarding jobs for them to flee to.
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
I assume you mean radioactive, and the waste is as radioactive as the soil it was drawn from after 400 years. While you rail on those nasty pro-business conservatives, it might be good to know that waste fears are overblown. Further, if it's radioactive, it's still useful- we could reprocess it into more useful fuel.
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
My nuclear power plant basically prints money, and we're tops in any WANO, NRC, or INPO rating there is. Any safety comprimises we could make to increase profits would amount to a petty amount of money (relatively speaking) and would attract unwanted attention from the NRC, WANO, and INPO.
Not to mention it would violate the principles of the operators to make such a sacrifice in the first place. Of course, it's easy for you to think of a nebulous, evil corporation cutting corners to make an extra 0.005% profit. Imagining that there are good, highly qualified men and women at the controls would invalidate some of your theories.
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
Always a problem, but new plants will probably be built on the site of existing plants, minimizing that problem.
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
We can buy plenty of security and still make plenty of money. I obviously can't go into details, but security around my plant is pretty tight.
On top of that, you would have to be extremely knowledgable about the plant and have unfettered access for quite some time to do damage that would result in a significant public health effect. Yes, I would know.
I know that other countries have made nuclear work (France is the most cited example.) However, those countries have been able to regulate the plants more closely without conservatives jumping all over their governments for 'promoting socialism' and 'over-regulation'. Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners.
You are clearly ill-informed. Your socialist regulated paradise of France does a fine job, and so do Americans. Your political ideology seems to blind you to the latter.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
We could replace the Copper wires with something better for long runs. OR we could put solar panels along all the lines :)
YEAH!!!! kick the crap out of this know nothing. it's disgusting that people act like they know everything around here when they obviously are too stupid to learn.
http://www.mhall119.com
The ring could be stable if you didn't need to use it's rotation to produce artificial gravity. This would also remove the problem of material strength.
http://www.mhall119.com
A shell large enough to envelop the sun would be so exposed that there's no way to protect it from the hundreds or thousands of meteors and comets that would batter it every day. How would you go about maintaining such a behemoth?
I see nothing in the least wrong in language evolving. "Fear" at the time of the King James Bible meant "respect." "Contact" was once a pretentious affectation when used to mean "communicate with".
However, sloppy thinking and sloppy habits of writing often cover for each other; when you are accustomed to one you can easily fail to perceive the other. It's not that habits of reflexive and unthinking amplification ("literally", "obviously"), or dressing up arguments of distraction in the terms of logic ("ad hominem!") debase the language. It's that they confuse both the speaker and the listener.
Here the original poster seems to be using the term "beg the question" correctly. He was saying that the question of a technology's potential could not be addressed until the question of its implementation cost had been answered. Except this doesn't really make any sense. Naturally, the first question you want to ask is does this work at all? After that you can ask, can we afford to transition the current infrastructure over? I suppose it is not utterly illogical to ask the second question first, it's just pointless.
That's the obscuring power of habitual sloppy writing for you. It's perfectly valid to point out that just because the physics of something works doesn't mean it can work economically. However, the habit of speaking and thinking in pseudo-logic gets confusing, and somehow squeezing that valid point through a randomly chosen logical template transmutes a sound piece of economic reasoning into an unthinking prejudice against new ideas.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We're most likely not doing it because the people invested in making something like that happen are more invested on Oil Dollars.
No, from TFA: "So what do we need to do to ramp up CSP? Interestingly, most CSP executives don't talk much about the need for government R&D. They mostly need policies aimed at creating initial market demand that would help bring down costs quickly over the next several years." In other words, it doesn't pay out to do it yet and they need subsidies.
Currently hooked on AMP
Assuming just 1 acre costs around $10k (pretty safe assumption if the government is using eminent domain to get the land) it would cost around $45 billion for just the land. The cost of the construction job would obviously dwarf that (especially because it'd be a government job). So I would guess the cost of such a project to be probably 5-10 times the cost of the Iraq war ($522 billion). If you would like to estimate the cost more fully. You should look at an RS Means Mechanical Cost Estimate book.
So what? There are billions of gallons of oil in the ground. That doesn't mean that it scales out.
Solar energy collection is great, when you've got a ton of land you're not using. But you get diminishing returns as you grow. You start using land that's almost useless, then land that's not critical, then you hit the wall.
If you do everything in space, and you have a mechanism to move that power from space to the earth, that doesn't happen. You can grow, and grow, and grow, endlessly.
Consider the amount of effort that is plowed into space programs and military programs. Now, consider that there is absolutely no practical utility directly returned from those programs. There are spill-over effects, they push the state of the art in a whole host of different areas as they tackle these technical obstacles, but at the end of the day, putting an installation on the moon for scientific research isn't going to feed the hungry.
This project should supplant those projects. It is a feasible way to completely decouple our energy generation from our environment and it presents a path for our species to grow to the capacity of this world and beyond. There is no greater prize.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Here is a huge database of solar thermal, solar concentrator pictures:
http://pointfocus.com
No. That's a standard conspiracy theory nut job line (usually used to explain why the water powered car has been suppressed) that went mainstream at some point.
If Shell, BP, Exxon, whoever, heard of a clean energy source that was ACTUALLY cheaper than fossil fuels they'd invest in it, no holds barred. Now or fifty years ago, but especially now that it's a PR coup as well.
Instead alternative energy sources are more expensive. So the energy companies DO invest in them, but cautiously. They know very well that there are some people who will pay extra for "clean" power, but the majority will just take the lowest price.
Here you can pay an extra 20% or so on your power bill to get your electricity from wind power. Some people do. Mostly it looks like malls do it, and then advertise the fact to make you feel good for shopping there.
Wow... Where to start with this topic. I'm by no means an expert in the subject of power, but I have been studying it for approximately a year now (as an electrical engineer) and know people who work in the industry, etc. After reading many of the comments, I just wanted to try and clear up a few of the possible issues I see with this new source of power.
Before I get into that though, I want to briefly discuss how power is produced today, since there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about how things seem to work.
Power utilities today have quite a few resources to generate power. The "base load" power that everyone seems to talk about these days comes from large generation units that maintain a continuous, rated power level 24/7. The reasons for this are usually economical, but can also be based out of safety concerns for things like nuclear power. Depending on the area, the remaining power is usually generated with generation units that are committed a few days in advance (although it is possible to get a generator started from a cold start in 1-2 hours) All generators have ramp rates (the maximum amount the power can change during a given period of time), so they are unable to change their power outputs instantly. In cases where the load demanded by the consumer starts to creep above that being generated by the power plants, peaking stations (normally natural gas based) can come online and are able to respond to the load change. Natural gas, while effective at being able to keep the power generation and load in balance, is expensive, so peaking plants normally don't operate unless power prices are high or it is necessary to use them.
If the load drops for any reason, power plants are capable of throttling down their power generation (again, subject to ramp rates) to approximately 10-20% of their rated output. Anything less than this and the unit will be forced offline (because a minimum level of stream production is necessary to turn the turbine, etc) Although this is one method of regulating power, generation units have a cost curve. The rated power is where the cost of generation is a minimum. Above and below that point, cost starts to rise, sometimes dramatically.
Alternative resources like wind are used, but not heavily due to the nature of their power production. With modern forecasting techniques, operators are able to predict fairly accurately what wind patterns will be doing 3-5 hours in advance. The major problem occurs when the wind stops blowing. Even though we know 3-5 hours in advance that we need to generate more power, it takes a lot of effort (and money) to commit a bunch of generators to make up the shortage on such short notice. Because of this, wind power tends to only make up a small percentage of total power - so only one or two generators need to come up to make up for any shortfall.
So what does this have to do with the current topic you ask? What the article seems to suggest is replacing the multitude of fossil fuel based generators with a few solar power generators. While this may look good on the surface, in reality there are many problems.
The first thing that comes to mind is reliability. People take for granted just how reliable the North American power grid is. In many countries of the world (such as India), power producers cannot meet demand and must make sacrifices to various areas (usually rural) to keep the load balanced. For most modern generators, it's not unreasonable to assume a 1-2% outage rate a year. With multiple smaller generation facilities, this isn't much of a problem, since it is easy to make up the shortage by bringing another generator online. Normally, the system has "reserve power" in the form of generators that are online but not producing power. These generators must be able to start producing power in 15 minutes or less. So, if a generator fails, another generator will be brought up in its place and within an hour should be producing the full amount of required power. In the ev
Well, neither is a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere just isn't passively unstable, but once it starts moving WRT the sun, there's nothing to stop it or slow it down. (Or speed it up, which is how it differs from a RingWorld.)
My favorite is a Topopolis, also called "Cosmic Spaghetti". The idea is that you orbit a cylinder, and just start extending the ends. Rotate it for gravity, so you want one that's pretty wide. Occasionally you include a non-rotating section where you make joints to other strands.
You start this in solar orbit, so it's a bit beyond our current capabilities, but not very far. Some sections are pressurized, some aren't. Eventually you just start building out in the direction of the Oort clouds, and you consume any asteroid that come close for building materials. You'd probably want a mag-lev on the outside for fast transport to distant segments.
In case of social disagreement, any segment could remove itself from the rest, move to a new orbit, and start building from there.
But now I'm talking about a LONG time in the future. We couldn't start this until we've got space factories working, and there's lots of details to work out before that happens. (Pity, I though we'd be at least THAT far along by now. Too much military and short-term thinking at NASA. We could have been working on factories before the 1990's started.)
Well, if we don't, someone else will. China probably. Because we abdicated our responsibilities.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I recently costed out a solar setup for my house, located in Seattle, and with about a 40% contribution from state subsidies, it had only a 32 year payback on my investment. Yep, 32 years. It's not economically feasible, yet. But it will be.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Don't American's realize that THE reason that this will more than likely NEVER take place is that there is NO WAY to make a boat-load of money off it. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING happens by ANY business or government entity unless there is money to be made.
Among other things, it works a whole lot better in the deserts of the southwest, where you get sunshine 345 days of the year. Not as well in most population centers.
I know that other countries have made nuclear work (France is the most cited example.) However, those countries have been able to regulate the plants more closely without conservatives jumping all over their governments for 'promoting socialism' and 'over-regulation'.
Oh ye fracking gods. Please provide citations showing that conservatives have successfully undermined nuclear safety in the USA.
The major problem is not conservatives, it is people who hate and fear nuclear power; and most of those are liberals.
Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners.
Oh so true. That's why all our cars are so unsafe; they are built by for-profit companies. Oh wait, our cars are actually pretty safe. Well then, that's why elevators fail so often, dropping people and killing them... oh wait, that isn't much of a problem either.
Well then, let's turn it around. The Soviet government ran the reactor in Chernobyl, so it must have been a shining example of safety and best practice, yes? Well, no.
You know, there will always be for-profit companies that do stupid and evil things, and people will be hurt. There will also always be government employees who take payoffs to allow stupid and evil things to happen, useless government employees who just do nothing, and stupid and evil government employees who cause problems.
The free market is neither magically dangerous nor magically safe. On the whole, it's pretty safe, because stupid and evil companies tend to come to grief in the long run. People don't like watching a free market at work, because it can be messy in the short run, so they tend to be in favor of government action to moderate things. (Case in point: sub-prime mortgage crisis. It's messy but the best thing the US government could do is just leave it the Hell alone and let the market correct. But people are screaming "Do Something!")
P.S. In case you knee-jerked to my words and labelled me as a conservative: I'm not. I'm a libertarian. On the whole I'm in favor of government just leaving business alone, but nuke power is sufficiently dangerous that I would welcome rather more government oversight than I would over most other businesses.
Um, no. Ringworld is supposed to mass 2Ã--10^27 kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld). Earth masses 5.9736Ã--10^24 kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth). There isn't enough material on the planet to make a ringworld, by three orders of magnitude. The asteroids, all taken together have a mass less than 1/10 that of the moon (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Solar/asteroid.html), which is 7.3477Ã--10^22 kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon), five orders of magnitude less than you'd need for a ringworld.
Note that that's a ringworld made of scrith, which Niven said has a tensile strength that is pretty much the theoretical maximum for normal matter, i.e., WAY stronger than anything we can hope to make. Asteroids and planets are not made of scrith anyway, so you'd probably lose quite a bit of mass in the manufacturing.
If you want to build a ringworld you're going to have to look at dismantling Jupiter (1.8986Ã--10^27 kg) AND Saturn (5.6846Ã--10^26 kg).
Forget the Dyson sphere until you can reliably transport a LOT of very large planets, or a decent number of stars, over interstellar distances. At that point you've used enough energy that you have probably thought of something better than solar power anyway.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. The capital cost of building a nuclear power plant is far less than building a solar thermal plant with the same power output. To build a 1GW solar thermal plant would take miles of glass, mirrors, and concrete. (The largest solar thermal plant until recently was an enormous plant in California's death valley which only produces something like 200MW).
With both nuclear power and solar thermal, the major costs are initial capital expenditures. Solar thermal is more than twice as expensive as nuclear at present because the initial expenditures are much higher for a given power output.
Unlike the author of the article, I doubt that solar thermal will ever be economically competitive with nuclear power. If there were drastic reductions in the prices of concrete, turbines, and construction, then the price of nuclear power would be reduced by as much as solar thermal, and the present price disparity would remain. And if the cost of borrowing were reduced (a huge part of the cost of both nuclear and solar thermal) then the price of nuclear would be reduced by as much as solar thermal.
It seems likely that nuclear power will have greater price reductions than solar thermal. Solar thermal is an extremely low-tech solution that's essentially the same as it was decades ago and whose price almost entirely depends on things like the price of construction and the cost of borrowing. Whereas nuclear power continues to experience significant cost-saving technological developments like passive safety systems.
At present, solar thermal costs $0.20/KwH busbar in places like Death Valley. Even in scorched deserts, the price of solar thermal is more than twice the price of nuclear. In cloudy northern climates the economics would be worse.
However, countries like Germany, Poland, and the UK could conceivably be supplied with power from solar thermal because they're close enough to Spain and Northern Africa that transmission over HVDC lines would be feasible without too much loss. But the cost would be greater than the $0.20/KwH busbar mentioned above.
http://www.nanosolar.com/ They produce very low cost solar electric cells that could be placed on roofs. Currently they are just under $1/kw and expect their prices to drop as they improve their methods. They are building a plant that should be able to churn out 400+ Mw of capacity a year which will triple the US production capacity of solar panels. Again, I wasn't trying to hate on nuclear. I love it.
32 years is a long time.
In sunny San Diego, we expect to make our money back in 12 years.
The solar panels are under warranty for 20 years.
Sounded like a pretty good deal to me.
And there's just something cool about making your own energy.
Better yet, let's ignore all the advances in material science and engineering that would first have to occur before we could even attempt this, and instead just hope that some "superman" from another planet, who is genetically designed to utilize our sun's unique energy as a source of superhuman strength, gets sent here as a child and is raised by loving parents with a puritanical work ethic, enabling us to use him to turn a large turbine to power the entire planet and maybe fight some crime and social injustice in his spare time. Now that would solve everything.
Solar panels are only good during the day... And Firefly Energy is only just now starting to ship products with their advanced lead-acid battery technology to run your computer at night.
Between Nanosolar's panels and Firefly's batteries, we are now able to get the same size solar system for 1/5 or 1/8th the cost of this time last year. Neverminding that all of Nanosolar's first year of panels have already been purchased, and that Firefly's batteries aren't yet shipping in quantity...
Geothermal heat pumps are another overlooked technology... I'd think a retrofit would be pretty easy: dig a 10 foot hole in your backyard, put in a container of some sort for coolant, and retrofit your AC condenser coils to bathe in pool of continuously circulating geothermally-cooled coolant.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
You're correct, of course, but a Dyson sphere, as actually imagined by Dyson, isn't a solid body like a huge, hollow planet with a sun at it's core. It's really more like a Dyson cloud - a huge collection of unconnected bodies orbiting the sun at the same distance. Niven's Ringworld was a solid body, but one could construct a ring of independent bodies like the original Dyson sphere.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I think the reason why the oil companies wont invest in renewable energy, is because if they do, they loose their constant revenue.
Yes, they may be able to manufacture the solar/wind/water hardware to sell to the consumer, but once thats done, they don't make any money. I suppose the counter to that would be that once everyone has version 1.0 of the "free energy" system, they will develop version 2.0 to sell you that produces even more energy, and they could sustain themselves that way. But I do agree that it is too profitable for them to make oil, than to invest in a renewable energy technology.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
He he he.
It is enough to me, that one has and got the reference!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Only two things in life are unavoidable, death and _________.
If you figure out a way around one or the other, please post it. I am interested.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
1. Driving a 100,000 lb truck is a more efficient way to transport electricity than a 145,000 V+ three phase line.
Yes, of course it is, or will have to be, for any non-nuclear, non-hydro, or non-fossil fuel source to be even remotely economically feasible as a first use low hanging fruit energy substitute. Electricity is just a *form* of energy. And if it was really the most efficient form of transporting energy, oil companies wouldn't ship oil by tankers and semi-trucks. Oil is just a different form of stored energy. Oil companies would convert oil to electricity and ship it by power lines. Sure, we communicate by satellite, we communicate by electric cables, so oil energy could just as easily have been converted into electricity and shipped by power lines. It never was because it would have been massively cost inefficient.
And all those nuclear, hydro, and fossil fuel energy sources would be vastly more efficient, more profitable if you could eliminate unnecessary infrastructure costs and maintenance, not to mention security costs. Roads are cheap grid substitutes. Power line grids limit your market. Supply (as in delivery area) is artificially constricted, although companies do love the monopoly pricing dependency tentacles. There's a reason all energy forms aren't converted to electricity. There's a reason electric public transportation can't compete in the free market without government subsidies. Infrastructure Grids are inefficient on both the supply and the demand side.
It's just a matter of quality energy storage cells being developed. This will happen. And given the revolution we've seen in a real market competitive technologically innovating industry such as computers with regard to data storage, I would expect similar results for energy storage, which can be regarded as just another form of highly charged data storage. We won't be hooking up million mile tentacle cables to send electricity to power Space Shuttle missions.
So your old tech power generating line delivery industry is going to be economically crushed in the 21st century, just like railroads were crushed in the 20th century.
2. That the current electrical grid was designed and built not with sound engineering and economic principles in mind, but as a way to extract subsidies while laying out real dollars and doing real work.
Absolutely it wasn't, *exactly* as railroad track was built in the 19th century. All you do is subsidize out competition and forever prohibit new competition that won't ever receive the same level of initial infrastructure subsidies. This results in power company tycoons and politician campaign contributions and connected jobs payoffs. They only existed by stealing infrastructure costs from the public taxpayer and then bending the consumer over with monopoly prices.
4. That smaller isolated grids would be more reliable than what we have now.
Complete elimination of grids would be more reliable. Have fully charged flashlight batteries ever failed during a storm outage? Nope. Energy storage cells which can be delivered by trucks traveling roads will serve to keep local power companies monopoly pricing in check, and eventually render wire/cable infrastructure inefficient. Power companies are massively inefficient monopolies, with a horrible record of customer service, pricing, and technological innovation. Why work or take risks when you can sit on your ass collecting monopoly tax rents with your tentacle lines plugged into every home and business?
I work in the power generation business. Please feel free to ask any specific questions you would like answered.
It takes energy to move energy. Which industry is more economically profitable, oil, or electricity power company? What are the relative energy amounts lost per unit of energy moved costs, as varied by distance, for a "145,000 V+ three phase line"? You can guess a percentage efficiency on a scale from 0% to 100%.
The closer that "line" get
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Not with nuclear fission as we know it. With the once-through cycle, there's only fuel for a few decades. Reprocesssing and breeding means plutonium sources all over the place; Google the news for "Iran" to see the problems with that.
Fusion and accelerator-driven technologies using thorium have potential, but uranium fission is a dead end.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
But I'm in Northern Europe, you insensitive tanned clod!
Not to open up a tired old can of worms, but I drive a Prius.
Why?
Because I don't like spending my money on gasoline. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it doesn't have as good a return on investment as a small diesel car.
But you have to let the market know that people want these things, or they'll never happen. We want cleaner alternatives.
Kudos to everyone who is putting solar on their homes. Early adopters are often times the visionaries that make good things become available to the rest of the world.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Here in Spain, the energy companies are forced to buy your surplus at a cost higher than market value. I think it is pretty much the same all around Europe.
And yet not many people install PV. (??)
Unerstanding Tibet
Many people do not understand the problems in Tibet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9QNKB34cJo On you Tube there is a video that is makeing its way to be the most discussed ever. Many people believe youtube is crawling with agents from China. Most of the agents Happen to be students. Many people View the video to be propaganda. That is mostly because they don't understand it. The video in is China viewed from a multicultural perspective. True vision is not to see what it is but what it should be. To realise the vision we need to realize the ability to make change does not lie with the loudest voice, the largest hammer or the most power.
The ability enact change lies in having the greatest understanding. The ability to change lies in knowing the weak points in ourselves and the weak points in whatever stands in the way. One think that most people expressing themselves agree on is everyone thinks they know what is best for tibet. The problems started not because tibet wanted to separate but because of a lack of understanding of Tibetans. I see no way better of getting a understanding of them then talking to them. The problems are more systemic and not confined to tibet. Tibet is on the border, has the Dalai lama, so it has the greatest voice abroad. On the part of Chinese there is a real fear that China will fall apart like Russia and Yugoslavia. The resonse has often been to clamp down and clamping down has always made the problems worse.
The video also draws a connection to Quebec. In Canada the message to Quebec was we love you and want you to stay, and they did. The way for change does not lie in casting aside who we are and how we got there, but in opening ourselves to new ideas and new understandings. the video shows Tibet is part of the history of China.
It is though the act of walking its long and difficult path to freedom that China will realize its place as a Great Nation.
A riot is the language of the unheard.Martin Luther King, Jr.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from
lynching me, and I think that's pretty important. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you agree and feel it is importand to share this please paste this and start a chain letter and send it to your friends. -sm
from pajamapanda.blogspot.com
Free Speech can not Loose on the battle Ground of ideas.
Free speech will win on battle ground of ideas.
With all of history at our command how can we loose. So How can we loose?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.- Sun TzuWe
If anyone learns about free speech then we have won as we have spread the idea.
Free speech just can not loose.
A people which is able to say everything becomes able to do everything.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte ~
solar is nothing but a god damn TOY.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As long as we're assuming why don't we assume that power companies might be encouraged to build these on land that they already own and that power companies will spend their own money (or their customers' own money) on building this out if only the pump can be primed? The idea is not that it will cost a ton of money (it likely will) it's a question of what will it take to motivate companies to shift the source of their electrical production.
Are you kidding? Solar could easily solve all our power needs, and then some. Also, solar thermal plants are capable of running at night. While it's sunny, they generally produce a lot more heat than the generators can use, so that extra heat is transferred to storage tanks to be used during the evening. The output is lower, yes, but nevertheless they do run through the night.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
For precisely the same reason that:
is an obviously farcical statement. There is always a long way between the marketing statements of those with a vested interest or ideology to push, and reality.
Using an extreme position (on either side of the debate) is not the way forward. Insisting that solar thermal is useless and should not be pursued because it cannot go from no market share to the whole market overnight is about as sensible as saying that we should ban oil because it is not zero emission.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Might want to read this article. In this case the problem is not technical at all but rather a legislative one. More or less a problem of zoning variance, or possible NIMBYs for neighbors. The guy has the technical details worked out and is ready to act on them if he can get approval.
As for downstate (Illinois in this case), wind power is now turning out to be a proven. Having wind turbines interspersed on agriculural acrage works quite well and is strongly compatable. (Farmers also make good enough money on the lease, even if the surrounding crops don't do so well.) Also people finally got smart about implementing good safety illumination that still makes the FAA happy, so modestly glowing red lights have finally replaced the annoying and distracting strobes at night. (No longer a distraction to nearby highways at night.) Maintenance appears fairly low once turbines are up and running, so once its patched into the grid it seems the rest is just gravy.
The oil/energy companies DO invest in renewable energy. As I said, the power company here will happily sell you electricity from their wind farm, or from their coal and oil plants. You've gotta pay more for the wind though.
How is developing solar/wind/water going to hurt their revenue stream? Are you assuming that these alternate sources are going to be too cheap to meter? That's not a good assumption. In fact, they cost more than fossil fuel alternatives. They're not free, in any way. Since you're not paying for fuel that means the capital investment is higher, the lifetime is shorter and/or the maintenance is greater. With any combination of those, the company that supplies the hardware is going to have just as good a revenue stream as if they were pumping oil out of the ground and selling it.
Grids are expensive and security risks.
Quite the opposite. Grids are robust and fault tolerant. The problem isn't transmission and distribution, it is generation (big central power plants)
A decentralized power system would be much more economically efficient
You mean decentralised GENERATION. The power grid would not be susceptible to giant blackouts if we didn't have gigawatt power plants able to go off-line because one tower collapses in a forest fire or lightning strike or because a unit tripped when an operator pulled a Homer Simpson. Apart from that the grid is VERY robust--even when a large substation has a trip the transients dissipate within a pretty small area.
Grid = Monopoly
Actually the Internet is a grid consisting of millions of people and businesses. Even the electric grid in North America consists of numerous owners and operators.
It's economically efficient to transport oil and gasoline by tankers and by semi truck to decentralized filling stations.
Wrong. Pipeline networks are more efficient, safer and reliable. There's never been an on-land pipeline catastrophe on the scale of the Exxon Valdez mess. It is only at the retail level where vehicular transport of fuel is preferred (and yes, decentralised filling stations are most efficient--but that requires a network...or grid... of fuel transportation systems).
Natural Gas is another "grid"...it spends most of its life moving around in a network of pipes.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready.
Why does solar energy need to be transported? Solar energy hits all habitable areas of the world! We don't need to take over 8400 square miles of Arizona with a complex of solar-thermal generating units--that would be foolish! What you do instead is build neighbourhood solar-thermal units to collect the heat, store it geo-thermally and use a heat engine of a sort to generate electricity for the immediate vicinity. The interconnected grid would remain important, as different areas may not capture enough energy to meet local needs at all times.
Well, except for my wife. She's is a taxpayer and not a citizen (yet). There are millions of people like her, they're usually called immigrants.
Yes, of course it is, or will have to be, for any non-nuclear, non-hydro, or non-fossil fuel source to be even remotely economically feasible as a first use low hanging fruit energy substitute.
This just completely defies the laws of physics. The efficiency of transporting power over a line vs. using a truck that is heavier than the "storage cell" you envision, powered by an engine that puts out more energy in heat than as kinetic energy, is just absurd.
Complete elimination of grids would be more reliable. Have fully charged flashlight batteries ever failed during a storm outage? Nope.
Another completely absurd statement, primarily because you assume you'd have fully charged flashlight batteries to start with. I've had some come right out of the package nearly flat (defective batch), and batteries don't hold a charge indefinitely. With Lead Acid, NiMH or LiIon rechargeables you generally want to keep them topped up....oh wait, you do that with a charger...plugged into power from the grid...
Sorry, I'm all for decentralised generation and individual consumers being able to generate into the grid easier, but to say complete absence of a grid would be best is just being stupid. At that small a scale the equipment simply isn't reliable enough. The grid provides quality of service, load balancing and what not.
You seem to suggest that distributed systems are bad, when there are big examples showing the opposite (the internet and the electrical grid actually being very successful examples in fact). What's next, are you going to argue that we disconnect all computers from networks and exchange data by recording it onto physical media and posting it so that postmen can drive it around to its final destination? Are you going to rail against the evil, monopolistic carriers because they had politicians in their pocket and subsidised the building of their networks at the expense of competition?
Yes, politics stinks, but the technology is sound. Seems rather ridiculous to suggest absurd methods are superior to use technically because on corporate and government meddling in what technically is quite workable.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Is this just a parabolic trough? Where I live most new homes have ones of these on the roof to heat their water cylinders.
Great to see it done on such a large scale, though.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Your position depends entirely on efficiency calculations that I'm guessing you don't know how to make, and a belief that being profitable is somehow wrong and indicative of energy inefficiency.
The latter is a philosophical debate that would be pointless. The former is an area where you can demonstrate wether or not you know what the hell you're talking about.
Tractor trailer vs 145,000 kV line. Do you even know where to start calculating?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I've not seen anyone address the issue of cooling. If you run a turbine, you need water and you need to cool the steam that flows thru the turbine, which means lots more water. That means scaled up versions of these plants need to be near lots of water.
Are you joking? I can't tell.
Please read this:
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
the future does not look good if we don't act now the upcoming oil shortage, let's strive for engergy independence and responsible use of earth's resources:
Not Costa Rica.
i've always heard that solar thermal can be expensive in the form of maintenance. that you have to pay people to go around cleaning the mirrors and lenses. if that's true, i think i have the solution!
:)
at night (when the mirrors and lenses are not producing anything anyway), turn the suckers face down. most of the sand/dust will fall off. if necessary, install blowers and/or sprinklers beneath them. while they are face down, blow, sprinkle, then blow again. before sunrise, turn them back face-up. this could be completely automated.
that's my idea and i'm making completely free for someone to make the world a better place.
of course, i guess you're still going to have hire people to maintain the mechanical and electrical systems that do this stuff, so maybe it's a WASH!
i love puns
The problem everyone has with hydrogen power is "where do you get the fuel to create the hydrogen?" - why not use this to create the hydrogen fuel, and then THAT can be shipped around the country?
Global Warming should fix that... (yes, I am wary of the data I've been seen that have been extrapolated to Global Warming. That said, it still makes sense to make significant inroads to environmentally friendly and sustainable activities and products.)
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem. Well, the article is discussing solar thermal, so I'll stick to that. How does the waste cycle of molten salts in a solar thermal plant relate to the minimum 300 year life cycle of nuclear waste (the effects of which
I also think that might qualify as argument by fear.
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one. I personally have no qualms about having a solar or wind farm in my backyard (I'd quite welcome the notion), but have known people who think it "doesn't look nice." I don't think most of these people have a very clear grasp of the energy situation on our planet right now...nor a very keen sense of asthetics, in my opnion.
I won't argue your other points though, because I think they're right. I will add that power plant accidents in general seem to be rare, as is sabotage of power plants and infrastructure (though this being slashdot, I may be proven wrong in a post or two.)
Do You Experiment?
Just clarifying that I was suggesting that cloud cover would be less under Global Warming, rather than altering the tilt of the planet. Not much of an effect I guess but something.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
On a smaller scale you sometimes only want heat. Solar thermal works with hot water and shows real possibilites with airconditioning which is mostly just moving heat around - refridgeration used to be done with nothing but a heat source (kerosense flame) and a working fluid (ammonia). The solar thermal power talked about for electricity generation involves a lot of steam and big turbines and since the temperature difference is going to be low compared with coal, oil etc as the heat source the collection area needs to be large. Small turbines can only be optimised to get power under paticular conditions. Really big turbines can have arrays of blades designed to get power from steam as it loses pressure to get a lot more energy out - thus you can get a lot more than double the power from an installation double the size. Since the real problem in power generation now is covering the peaks a power source that is best in daylight is still very useful. Base load is also possible - there are ways to store steam for night time use or store the energy is other ways (eg. split ammonia by day and recombine it by night which produces heat).
The real reason alternative energies like wind, geothermal, nuclear and solar are not implemented widely is because it is usually a lot easier to burn stuff than it is to get energy in these other ways. Hydro is even easier but the conditions have to be right.
I was listening to an interview with one of the techies who does load balancing on the UK's national grid who said that wind and solar (any form) give him the willies because they're so unreliable from minute-to-minute.
Which shows he doesn't understand statistics - and how they apply to the many relatively small generation devices involved in wind and solar. They don't all come up and down on the same minute, even with a storm blowing up or furling the mills of a dense wind farm or cloud-shading photovoltaic or photo-thermal generation sites.
In particular, if they're a lot of little guys with grid-tied renewable energy systems that do net-metering or other sell-back modes, they have essentially the same switch-on, switch-off characteristics as heating and air conditioning loads - except with sign reversed. (Solar tends to track air conditioning load pretty well - with a bit of phase lead that still puts its hump overlapping the air-conditioning load hump. Wind tends to track heating load - mainly because air motion increases heat transfer across insulation, though partly because cooler weather is associated with air motion from storms.)
So solar and wind generation actually HELP keep the load and generation matched on the average, while not being more of a problem than the essentially completely uncontrolled customer load switching.
(Or at least that's how I understand it. If this is wrong I'll be happy to see a description of how and why. Preferably with some real-world data or tested models.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Rotation doesn't have anything to do with the stability problem - there is still nothing to keep the sun in the middle of it. Plus, if you don't rotate it, objects placed on the inside of the ring are going to have a tendency to fall off and into the sun.
Perhaps someone can enlighten me here, but isn't Nanosolar a CIGS (Copper-Indium-Gallium-Selenide) film technology? My understanding was that due to the rarity of Indium, Gallium and Selenium, scaling up that technology would simply drive up the price of the metals until it was more expensive than good old 'cheap', plentiful silicon? Obviously Nanosolar is confident of turning a profit, but it could be based on a supply contract price for only a certain amount of output.
It's not exactly "new" technology, actually. Windmills have been around for, what, thousands of years? And I'm 30, and I had a solar-powered calculator in like second grade.
I think that's the fiction here - "If we could just give Solar energy the start it needs, it could take off!"
That kind of brings me back to my original point (the grandfather post of this): One solar panel optimally collects a finite amount of energy - right? So, x solar panels can only optimally collect that amount, times x. No "stunning breakthroughs" in solar panel technology can alter the laws of physics to make the sun output more energy, or to make more of that energy arrive at Earth. So we're limited in the optimal energy production that's possible using solar power.
Clearly, it *doesn't* work on a small scale, otherwise we'd all provide all the power we needed with solar panels on our houses! And before you say, "But we could put them all on the equator!" you need to answer this - why, then, do people living in sun-rich areas still require fossil fuels to provide their energy needs?
If solar power doesn't work on a small scale, any money we throw at this problem on a large scale might as well be thrown down the toilet.
1. Alternative energy sources have high upfront cost, which would cut into this years profits and kill the bonuses of executives. The fact that profits may be higher 20 years ahead is irrelevant to most.
2. The cost of traditional energy sources is highly subsidized, both directly and indirectly. Direct subsidies are obvious things like tax breaks to oil companies. Indirect subsidies are not making people (not just the oil companies!) pay the costs of the pollution the energy the use produce.
Both of these issues can be address with good, free market friendly government policies. First, remove all reoccurring subsidies from oil and ethanol and replace them with low interest loans to reduce the barriers to renewable energy initiatives. Second, a pollution tax to allow the free market to work to reduce emissions.
No "Big Oil Dollars Conspiracy" is preventing you, me, or anyone else, from buying solar panels and windmills and using them to provide for all of our energy needs.
If your contention is that solar power can provide all our energy requirements, then why are you still paying an electric bill and arguing with people about how "other people" ought to provide themselves with energy? Just go out and buy the solar panels! Do you have a credit card? Then you can buy them, right now, over the internet! So buy some! Install them, and sit back and just laugh at all the suckers still paying gas and electric bills!
I guess my point is this: If solar power can't provide *you* and *me*, as individuals, with energy that's less costly, then why would you assume that it would work on a larger scale? Again, there's nothing magical about having a million solar panels clumped in the same place - they still collect the same amount of energy as one solar panel, in a million different places.
*beats you repeatedly over the head with a printed copy of logicalfallacies*
And all countries barring Hades have access to the sun, some more than others but it's far more equally available than fossil fuel or uranium deposits.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
...I would expect similar results for energy storage....
You are confusing the storage of a physical thing, such as energy with storage with a non-physical thing, such as information. Information itself is not physical in the same way that energy is. Matter itself is the densest means of storing energy, but this energy is not easily accessed. The best we have done so far is nuclear fission.
Electricity is the most versatile form of energy, but it cannot be easily stored with present technology. I must be converted as needed from some other form, usually chemical energy in batteries or some sort of fuel. If the electrical energy equivalent of a gallon of diesel fuel could be stored in an equal weight and volume battery, most, if not all other forms of energy storage would disappear. Electricity can be converted cheaply and easily into movement of objects and heat.
All theory is gray
Taxing emissions means the taxpayers have to support a tax increase: something they haven't been willing to do to this point.
British Columbia is introducing a carbon tax though. They've been clever about it: they dropped personal income taxes to compensate, so the whole thing is revenue neutral. They'll have to increase the income tax rate eventually, of course, as people switch to cleaner energy sources the income from the carbon tax will drop. But in the short term it gets everyone used to the new system and makes it seem as if it will be free.
....The efficiency of transporting power over a line vs. using a truck ....
That depends on what the truck is carrying and how efficiently that can be turned into electricity. An 8000 gallon truckload of diesel fuel contains about 1,328,000,000BTU of energy. If all of that could be converted to electricity, it would come to 389,198 kilowatt hours. One of the largest power lines in the USA, the 500,000 Volt DC, roughly 850 mile Pacific Intertie from the Columbia River to Sylmar CA, can carry a full load of about 3100 megawatts. Therefore, that line is able to carry a truckload of diesel fuel energy equivalent about every 7 and a half minutes. A pipe line would need to transport a little over 1000 gallons/minute of fuel for the energy equivalent of that electrical transmission line. For perspective, the power coming down that line will run about 3 million households.
Because I'm feeling lazy right now, I'll leave it to someone else to figure out what the losses on that power line and practical conversions might be as compared to the the cost of driving that truck.
All theory is gray
Please use the calc. 64 MW is ridiculous. At 3kw
for every family, it's about 21'000 houses per
275 acres. Now think on how much terrain you'll
need to feed (of power) New York and that
actually it's used to feed it (of food!!!!!).
In the example, "Have you stopped beating your wife?", the questioner assumes wife beating already exists. It is a logical fallacy because the premise is assumed true without challenge; it is a technique of dishonest debate because it attempts to hide the unsupported premise.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"Begging the question" is to ask a question which only makes sense to ask after certain other questions have been answered. The classic example is, "have you stopped beating your wife?"
On Slashdot, the question that begs is "How did you get a girl to date you, let alone marry you?"
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
What part of "Oil will run out" does everyone miss. I love how everyone is still considering the fine details of whether solar is really cheaper or better as if we have any choice. The only choice is when we wake up and move to solar, whether there will be some oil left for the applications that cannot be run off stored electricity.
It would seem obvious to conserve oil for those applications rather than burning oil to power large cities that are not moving and sit close to huge solar resources. If there is a move to serious conservation, maybe oil can be available for centuries to come for the applications that most need it. Generating electricity for a metropolis is not one of them and the fastest way to ensure ultimate collapse of the supply.
The world needs to appreciate you cannot run planes on electricity, cannot build sufficient solar resources in low density locations, small islands and artic towns. We need to conserve some oil for the long term, so the issues are far more pressing than is being appreciated.
There's a learning curve in any industry that brings efficiency and better design, but we need to start to leverage those advances.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Damn. Shoulda patented it! It's just a form of CAES which already exists on land, course they don't get the benefit of all of the ocean pressure.
Deleted
HTH.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Instead of downplaying the risks of nuclear, how about we start up-playing the risks of coal/oil.
Loud and often.
Let's hold coal/oil to the same safety standards as the naysayers are applying to nuclear.
No sig today...
The Civil War caused the need to commandeer whaling ships as cargo ships. Coal mining was already taking place and kerosene became an easier resource to collect than whale blubber (due to the lack of available whaling ships). Perhaps we read different history books?
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
I does work on a small scale. It works on a larger scale in Spain (by the same company putting a new plant in AZ). How come more money in the form of credits and tax breaks goes to fossil fuels than solar? Do they still need to be researched? Are fossil fuels still so much in their infancy that they have to be funded this way? This particular technology is fairly "new". It's not the solar cell from your second grade calculator, it's a solar(heat) powered turbine.
Technically, in the long run solar power should be less costly. But you have two factors to weigh:
1. Americans are short sighted. Who wants to spend $captial now that will only pay off in 10 years?
2. I'm broke. I can afford $300/month, can't afford $10000 now.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Thanks, I am now better informed.
Despite my misuse of the term "Begs the question" I had an honest question that everybody treated as a direct attack- and I've been modded into oblivion. So much for insight on slashdot. The only thing I learned from my question is that I misused the term "Begs the question"
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
For a similar example, see the delivery of water by manufactured bottle as opposed to delivery by pipe. That shows how economics efficiency can be more important than physics efficiency. Depending upon how many BTUs you can stuff into similar sized containers you have a possible use. Now if the local monopoly power company is charging excessive rates per BTU (to pad the profit margin made on per BTU delivered) such a "manual" delivery system indeed does become economically competitive. Just as "black market" copying of flash memory data drives off the internet grid becomes competitive given the costs of detection and punishment.
Your assumption is power companies base their rates on the physics costs of delivery. I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive layer of bureaucracy in power companies and accounting methods that hide profits as costs. You seem to suggest that distributed systems are bad, when there are big examples showing the opposite (the internet and the electrical grid actually being very successful examples in fact). They are bad when all the pieces of the grid are monopoly owned (either government or private corporation enabled by government). They become much less malleable, less competitive, and less resilient to damage.
Super light weight trucks transporting super lightweight energy storage cells packing Mega Units of energy becomes competitive on the physics technical side at some distance for some amount of energy delivered given the infrastructure and maintenance costs of both delivery systems. There's certainly a lot of expensive man hours and energy used in laying electrical wiring cables. Those wires require monitoring, inspection, replacement. They have costs beyond the physics technical delivery costs. This makes "manual" energy delivery by truck a theoretical *economic* competitive possibility at some X for some Y given some Z, etc., etc.
Food is energy for human powering. Yet it would be absurd to build expensive network delivery tubes to transport raw food stuffs from farms to the cities, and for restaurants to deliver food by constructing tubes to every possible residence in case they called for a take out order. It might make a lot more economic sense for individual consumer residences to buy their energy at the grocery store while big electric power companies focus on doing business with big factories that consume constant large amounts of energy.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
You do realize that oil companies don't pay taxes don't you? Who does, you ask? The customers, employees, and investors. People pay taxes. No matter how the politicians spin it, all taxes are paid with money taken from people.
When taxes are increased to punish evil oil companies, here is what happens:
1. The customers pay more for the product.
2. The companies' budgets for cost of living raises, new jobs, etc. goes down.
3. The investors (which includes virtually every single school teacher, police officer, and responsibly diversified person) looses value in their investments, pensions, and retirement accounts.
The problem is not "too low of taxes". The problem is the way taxes are disguised in the first place. How should tax liability be accessed? Based on consumption. Plain. Simple. Fair.
Any tax system that can't be read in about an hour and understood by the least of its subjects is oppressive and inevitably corrupt. If you understood the tax system you would storm Washington with torches and pitch forks.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
That would be a true Green Economic Revolution. Digging, mining, pumping becomes uncompetitive too expensive to bother, and the dirty costs of fossil fuels are eliminated by the free market and technological progress.
We also have a huge magnetic field surrounding the Earth.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Pollution costs however should not be heaped on to the oil companies, except in as much as they produce pollution in the course of their bussiness. They should not be responsible for the eventual pollution of the oil they sell to others. Instead the person or corporation that actually does the polluting should be responsible.
I like the point the other reply made about reducing income tax in proportion to the carbon tax. The goal is not to increase tax revenue, but to create a market incentive to reduce pollution.
While PV is getteng closer to economic, TFA points out that large scale solar boiler plants are where the economics really make sense. My weekends are just a bit busy to build a 3 GigaWatt power plant in my back yard.
The advantage of solar thermal is that it is practical right now using current technology. The disadvantage is that it does not scale down well.
OTOH, I am considering a solar pre-heating system for hot water. Again, a solar-thermal system.
Please don't get me wrong, if PV is a good value in your area, especially if it has an extra intangible value to you like 'cool factor', hobby, or 'green factor', by all means, go for it.
Actually no. The raw cost and the end consumer cost are entirely irrelevant to them. The one and only metric they care about is net profit TO THEM. Given a technology that would make them an EQUAL profit or even a greater profit but lower barriers to entry, they will do their best to avoid facillitating it.
They invest in the cautiously to cover the bases. One day, in spite of barriers to entry, someone is going to get things going and at that point they want to be prepared to jump in in a big way. However, their interest is in being second to enter that market.
Things that would get solar going include internalizing the externalities involved in fosil fuels and potentially a loan program to allow the higher initial build cost to be amortized over the life of the plant.
I'm not sure I understand, if you rotated the ring at it's orbital velocity around the sun, wouldn't any given portion of the ring be experiencing free-fall? Wouldn't that remove the stress on the structure?
As for keeping the sun in the middle of it, wouldn't gravity serve to keep any given portion of the ring at a set distance from the center of the sun? I mean, the sun stays in the middle of earth's orbit, why wouldn't it stay in the middle of a ring's orbit?
http://www.mhall119.com
As near as I can tell, the U.S. alternate fule/energy policy is very simople. 1. Select the most interesting alternative energy. 2. Select the most expensive, least practical, and most difficult implementation and push hard for it. 3. Avoid at all costs anything that can be accomplished with current technology until backed into a corner. 4. Tell everyone it's just not there yet.
That's why the emphasis has been on PV rather than thermal solar. That's why ethanol is being made from corn rather than agricultural waste. That's why nuclear reprocessing is banned, fast breeder research programs shut down, and billions are being spent to figure out how to bury perfectly good nuclear fuel mixed with 5% waste for 10,000 years rather than "burning" it in an IFR.
It seems very unlikely that the demand and price of oil will go down, even with billions of dollars of investment in alternative fuels. At best, I suspect we can decrease the rate at which the price increases.
What surface area are your panels? I would like to get my condo complex to install them on all of our buildings. I live in Florida, so I need to find some rated for Cat 3+ winds.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
Okay, so its your position that alternative energy sources are really cheaper than oil, but they haven't been widely deployed because of a corporate conspiracy?
Got some references? Alternate energy plants exist, so what do they charge for energy? These figures from the state of California would seem to disagree with you: http://www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/levelized_cost.html
Let's see. The cheapest is geothermal. Great if you live where it works. Second? Wind. Again, great if you live close by. It's also intermittent, so you need something to supplement it. Third: natural gas. Hm. The three of those are all pretty close, at 4.5-5.18 cents/kWh. What next? Well, hydro, at 6.04. Again, hydro is enthusiastically deployed, where the resources exist. After that? Now we're looking at things like solar thermal, in the 13.5-22 cent/kWh range. Not so good.
Would the costs even out if you charged for emissions? Sure would, but we don't, so until that changes there's no incentive for an energy company to put much development into alternative energies. Alternative energy sources are MORE EXPENSIVE and that price difference limits their demand, so they are not widely deployed. Besides being supported by the numbers it is also a much simpler conclusion than a big conspiracy theory.
Your idea would work if you had some system to keep the sun in the exact center of the ring. However, if it is not in the exact center, you have problems. Imagine that the system is just a bit off-kilter. By Kepler's laws, your orbit needed around the sun is no longer circular, it is now eliptical. This is a problem for the ring, as it's going to want to bend and this will stress the ring. Even if you allowed it to flex, the friction and ring's equilivent of tidal heating from constanly having to flex will sap energy from the system, you'll need to add energy to the system to keep the ring from slowing down enough that the sun's gravity tears it apart.
But you also have a bigger problem, the part closest to the sun is going to have to have a orbital velocity than the part farthest from the sun. For a rigid ring, this is simply impossible and if it is not sufficiently strong, the forces will rip it apart. The final problem is that the ring is not stable. It is correct that a sun placed in the exact center of the ring will have all the forces cancel out and the system is in equilibrium. But the equilibrium is unstable. If part of the circular ring is closer to the sun, then the gravity will tug on that section a bit more, pulling it a bit closer, which then increases the amount of the tug, etc. Basically, even the smallest perturbation will lead to disaster unless you have some system to correct it.
A better system would be to split the ring up into independent sections, essentially a chain of planets. This solves the flexing and different velocity problems, though it is still not stable - any pertubation in the orbit of any one of the planets would result in them eventually smashing into each other or having them ejected into new orbits until there was only one mass left in the "chain" (kind of like the "clearing the neighborhood" requirement in the definition of a planet).
Are you sure you're replying to the right post?
I said nothing at all about conspiracies or current costs and/or practicality of alternative energy. Nothing!
I did write about factors other than the direct cost of alternative energy that would likely enter into a coprorate decision making process and indicate that therefore, their non-entry into the market doesn't necessarily mean they believe it to be too expensive. Rather, it means they believe it to be currently less profitable for them. I then explained why those can be different.
If and when we reach a point where alternative energy will be cheaper as a whole but less profitable for an encumbant, I don't expect some sort of Conspiracy in a smoke filled room, rather I expect individual corporations to arrive at similar decisions based on similar circumstances.
Also, I expect that once some company does get into alternative energy and doesn't fall on it's face, the incumbants will then rush in wholeheartedly. Again, due to similar decisions, not a conspiracy.
I guess I misunderstood then. I said"
"No. That's a standard conspiracy theory nut job line (usually used to explain why the water powered car has been suppressed) that went mainstream at some point. If Shell, BP, Exxon, whoever, heard of a clean energy source that was ACTUALLY cheaper than fossil fuels they'd invest in it, no holds barred. Now or fifty years ago, but especially now that it's a PR coup as well."
and you said:
"Actually no. The raw cost and the end consumer cost are entirely irrelevant to them. The one and only metric they care about is net profit TO THEM. Given a technology that would make them an EQUAL profit or even a greater profit but lower barriers to entry, they will do their best to avoid facillitating it."
Since the energy market is a commodity market and there's lots of competition, the profit TO THEM is pretty much directly dependent on the end consumer cost and the raw cost.
Your post seemed to be arguing that the established energy companies are suppressing the alternative energy market because it lowers the barriers to entry to competitors. If anything the barrier to entry to the alternative energy market is higher, which I assume is why you suggested loan programs to lower that barrier.
The real reason alternative energy hasn't caught on seems to be much simpler: it costs more to generate, and you can't charge more for it because the majority of your customers will just choose the cheaper source.
I'll show you some working, power-producing solar-thermal power plants. Show me a working, power-producing solar-thermal power plant selling power at 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour without any Federal subsidies and I'll retract my prior statement. You missed my point entirely, bub. It's not that the technology isn't available, it's that it isn't economically practical right now when compared with alternatives.
Geez. Heating water with solar power really isn't rocket science. The improvements proposed for these power plants are mainly in engineering. On the other hand, we're still working on the science for fusion and antimatter. And I'll again direct you to the prior established point: efficient, economical solar power -- ones that can compete directly with nuclear and fossil fuel power sources -- are just as fanciful (for now) as fusion and antimatter. If you're too dense to grasp that...well, reference my sig below.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sorry, I've been lurking on Slashdot long enough that misuse of "begs the question" brings me out in hives. :P That, and if I jump on someone for a common logical fallacy I look smarter for very little effort. ;)
Your question is a good one, though, and while I don't know the answer, I can point out the economically obvious lower bound of "more resources than our current infrastructure requires to maintain". In the short- and medium-term, fossil fuels are simply cheaper to produce than alternatives, that's why they're universally used.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter. And yet another one misses the point entirely, all while making my point for me. It's not that solar power doesn't exist; any fool can see that. It's that you can't make it work (economically) for 6 to 8 cents per kW/hr. You yourself state it works right now at ~15cents/kW/hr. You'd have to make it at a minimum twice as efficient as it is now in order to hit (or slightly exceed) the 8cents/kW/hr figure. That is not a trivial task, even though hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent working towards that goal.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future plants can improve efficiency - through improved design/scale - to drop the price to between 6 & 8 cents. And it's entirely possible that pigs may fly as well, but it's very unlikely. You act as if it's just a matter of redesigning a widget here and scaling a widget there and POOF! The problem is solved! Have you no grasp whatsoever of how long people have been hammering at solar power efficiency scaling? Untold sums have been spent getting solar cell efficiency out of the single-digit percentages, and that was considered a fantasmically amazing feat at the time. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency. This is not a recipe for scaling well, nor is it something that can be easily "designed" away as you claim.
Radical breakthroughs in cell efficiency are needed to make solar a viable contender against nuclear and fossil fuels. I'd wager that we're more likely to make a breakthrough in fusion power than we are to double the efficiency of mass-produced, affordable solar cells in the next several decades. In the meantime, we're ignoring a practical, affordable, well-known power source that's abundant, clean, and reliable: nuclear fission.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I get tired of shooting down the nuclear promoters arguments. But, let's go again.
1. The waste argument is very valid. It has not been commercially undertaken and illustrated that actinides will be been burned off and allow 300 years to uranium ore levels of concentration. That 300 years by the way is not good enough. Ask yourself this question, Where will you, your child, your grandchild, your great grandchild, your great great grandchild or even your great great great grandchild be in 300 years? I can say "DEAD" and long decomposed. 300 years is approximately 10 !!!!! generations of humans. The waste will have to be husbanded for at least that length of time and if we continue with this industry, additonal 300 years increments until we decide to cease. That is the kind of legacy you wish to leave.
What will the global security environment be in 300 or the intervening years? (wars, terrorists, materials availability etc.
Do you honestly believe that we will go 300 years without major accidents, especially as we scale up, older plants breaking, general resource material quality (metals scarcity etc.) ?
Are there other options? If so, why bother with this albatross around our necks? Let me list out existing , near term and longer range possibilities to illustrate that the nuclear albatross is completely unnecessary long term.
Near term
1. Concentrating solar thermal with heat storage.
2. Wind.
3. Geothermal
4. Distributed thin film and concentrating PV
5. biofuels
Intermediate term
5. Wave power
6. fuel cell/turbine hybrids operating on natural gas/ biomethane etc.
7. tidal power
8. OTEC
Longer Term
9. high efficiency > 50% solar PV
10. hydrogen as a storage medium
11. Maybe even satellite solar (iffy)
Suppression implies an active holding back beyond their own independant actions. I suggest they might passively sit back and aim to be the second adopter rather than the first.
I certainly never claimed that to be the reason they don't act right now, only that if and when it does become practical, they may well choose to wait anyway.
One reason to wait is that as soon as a major player jumps in, economies of scale lower the costs for the second actor. Another is that the first actor faces greater risk of the unknown.
Internalizing the externalities of fossil fuel would bring alternative energy to the point that it competes on price sooner.
The loan idea is indeed intended to lower the barriers to entry, particularly for the first to enter.
Since the energy market is a commodity market and there's lots of competition, the profit TO THEM is pretty much directly dependent on the end consumer cost and the raw cost.Profit per unit sold will be directly dependant (+/- various market oddities), but total profit for a given player will also depend on how many players there are and how well prepared they are to produce in volume. In addition, dumping more supply on the market will drive the price of any commodity down. A new player to the game who has a really big sunk cost and a low marginal cost of production might skew the whole curve.
believe me, any commodity producer will think about that carefully, especially if there's no way to de-commodotize the product. None of that spells conspiracy.
Oh boy.
You'd have to make it at a minimum twice as efficient as it is now in order to hit (or slightly exceed) the 8cents/kW/hr figure.
If we were talking about photovoltaics (which we're not, see below), you'd have a number of options of getting the price down. You could try to improve cell efficiency (while trying to keep cell price in check - this is mainly a function of how expensive land is where you want to build your plan), cell longevity, or cell price (again, how effective this approach is depends on the cost of land).
Untold sums have been spent getting solar cell efficiency out of the single-digit percentages, and that was considered a fantasmically amazing feat at the time. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
Weren't we talking about solarthermal power generation, and not photovoltaics ? Talk about missing the point. Typical modern panels have a 12% efficiency, and the best available panels -- you know, those that cost several times that of the "typical" panels -- gets you to 20% efficiency.
See above.
Radical breakthroughs in cell efficiency are needed to make solar a viable contender against nuclear and fossil fuels. I'd wager that we're more likely to make a breakthrough in fusion power than we are to double the efficiency of mass-produced, affordable solar cells in the next several decades. In the meantime, we're ignoring a practical, affordable, well-known power source that's abundant, clean, and reliable: nuclear fission.
See above.
Did you RTFA ? I would guess you didn't. It talked about possible improvements in the next five to ten years. Who's missing the point ? It's not that the technology isn't available,
And it's much, much easier to improve (better design, cheaper production, etc) already existing technology than suddenly make something work that has been in the "we'll have a working plant in 30 years" for decades now.
And I'll again direct you to the prior established point: efficient, economical solar power -- ones that can compete directly with nuclear and fossil fuel power sources -- are just as fanciful (for now) as fusion and antimatter.
And you'll bet how much that this will still be the case in, say, five years from now? Ten years from now?
Did you RTFA ? I would guess you didn't. It talked about possible improvements in the next five to ten years. Who's missing the point ? It's not that the technology isn't available, You seem to have something of a reading comprehension problem, so I'll go real slow for you in the hopes that it'll actually sink in this time: I've never once stated that solar technology "isn't available." You made that up out of whole cloth to bolster your indefensible argument. What I stated (repeated for your non-comprehending benefit) is that the technology is not economically feasible. It cannot produce power at a cost competitive with other sources of energy, specifically nuclear and fossil fuels. Solar power has received immense funding since the early 1970's (which is nearly four decades ago just in case your math is as bad as your reading skills). During those 40 years, solar efficiency for typical mass-produced cells hasn't even doubled. It's gone from about 8% to about 12%. Exotic cells made of rare, expensive materials in small quantities have reached 20%, but their cost hurts the kW/hr figures so much that they're even less competitive than the mass-produced panels. Far from speeding up, research is yielding slower results with solar. Short of a breakthrough of unexpected dimensions, solar isn't going to magically increase in cost efficiency anytime soon. You can cling to wishful thinking that says otherwise, but the odds are not on your side.
And you'll bet how much that this will still be the case in, say, five years from now? Ten years from now? If you assume a linear progression of increases in efficiency and decreases in cost commensurate with the progress we've seen in the last 5-10 years, solar will still be at least 50% more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuels. The truth, however, is solar is progressing at a less than linear rate. Honestly, wind power turbines are moving ahead faster than solar is right now. If you actually knew anything about what you're trying to argue, you'd know that by now. What a pity you engaged your mouth (or your hands, as the case may be) before engaging your critical thinking skills, otherwise you'd not find yourself trying to defend a point that is completely fallacious.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If we were talking about photovoltaics (which we're not, see below), you'd have a number of options of getting the price down. You could try to improve cell efficiency (while trying to keep cell price in check - this is mainly a function of how expensive land is where you want to build your plan), cell longevity, or cell price (again, how effective this approach is depends on the cost of land). You make it sound like "improv[ing] cell efficiency" is just a trivial exercise, something to be done over a lunch break by two guys with a calculator. In fact, what you propose has consumed nearly four decades of research and untold hundreds of millions of dollars of funding...all to just get to where we are right now. If improving efficiency is the key to keeping costs down, you've (once again) made my point for me: the lack of efficiency is why solar has not made any meaningful impact on the energy grid. Mass-produced PV cells have increased from roughly 8% to 12% efficiency in forty years! Do you honestly think that something magical is going to happen in the next forty that'll quadruple this trend? Because that's what would be needed in order to make solar break-even with existing nuclear and fossil energy technology.
As for your "this isn't about PV, it's solar-thermal" argument, yes, I'm well aware of that. What you aren't well aware of is that solar-thermal is even less efficient than PV. Spain just finished a 50MW solar-thermal plant, and it's conversion efficiency is only 2.6%. So I was cutting you a break by going with a solar technology that was more cost efficient that what you're actually arguing about. However, since you've torpedoed your last, best hope for winning your argument by pointing out we're talking about a technology that makes your argument weaker, I'll leave you to ponder exactly why you started this debate in the first place.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh, don't bother. You don't need to go real slow, but maybe you should read more slowly, and you might actually comprehend some of those words.
I've never once stated that solar technology "isn't available."
But you're trying teally hard to make that argument that because its not competitive now, it will never be.
It cannot produce power at a cost competitive with other sources of energy, specifically nuclear and fossil fuels.
Right now. Again, how much are you going to bet that it will stay this way in the medium to long term (5+ years) ?
During those 40 years, solar efficiency for typical mass-produced cells hasn't even doubled. It's gone from about 8% to about 12%.
Prices have dropped quite a bit, though. Right ?
If you assume a linear progression of increases in efficiency and decreases in cost commensurate with the progress we've seen in the last 5-10 years, solar will still be at least 50% more expensive than nuclear or fossil fuels.
And what about price increases for fossil fuels and uranium ? What's going to happen to the price for nuclear fuels if a couple of large nations on this planet decide that plopping down a dozen nuclear plants is going to be part of the solution of their energy problems ?
You make it sound like "improv[ing] cell efficiency" is just a trivial exercise, something to be done over a lunch break by two guys with a calculator.
Right. And this is exactly why I didn't give two more (and probably more promising) options to bring the price down.
If improving efficiency is the key to keeping costs down, you've (once again) made my point for me: the lack of efficiency is why solar has not made any meaningful impact on the energy grid.
You're quite single-mindedly focusing on one of three options I gave. And you're wrong: The lack of efficiency is not why solar has not any meaningful impact on the energy grid. The cost for the cells is (still) the problem, even though it has dropped quite a bit. If we find a way to make PV cells with a really lousy efficiency (say, 5%), but at a tenth of the price, this would give solar a bigger boost than producing 20% efficiency cells at the same price as todays 10% efficiency cells.
What you aren't well aware of is that solar-thermal is even less efficient than PV. Spain just finished a 50MW solar-thermal plant, and it's conversion efficiency is only 2.6%.
Wow, nice one. I mean it. You just pulled a number from wikipedia without understanding a thing. The 2.6% is "electric power output" per "total amount of solar power that hits the area of the power plant, regardless of whether it's actually collected by the mirrors or just hits the ground". If you'd actually use a meaningful number (like, "electric power output" per "solar power that actually hits the collectors"), you'd find that this number is comparable or even higher than todays mass-produced PV cells. Maybe you should actually try to read the whole paragraph of the wikipedia article you're quoting next time ?
Hmm, that makes sense now, I hadn't thought about the differences in gravity and orbital velocity if the center of rotation wasn't also the center of gravity.
What if you had a closed sphere that was non-rotating, but rather inflated like a balloon, using the sun's energy to great a pressure inside the sphere to counter-act gravity? Doing it that way would mean that you don't worry about orbital velocities, and the closer a section is to the sun the more it is pushed out, so it would be self-correcting.
http://www.mhall119.com
I think the non-rotating sphere could work. It would have to be fairly light as the solar wind is not that strong, so I don't think you would be able to have oceans on it or things like that. If done right, you should have the the force of the solar wind approximately equal to the force of the gravity, so the total force on it would be close to nil. Of course, you've still got the problem of objects sitting on the inside falling into the sun, but if you wanted to use the outer "dark" side things should stay put. You would still have the minor detail of having to clear out all those asteroids and comets that come close to the sun, but if you can build a Dyson sphere I imagine you could deal with the asteroids.
It's a travesty you weren't modded (way!) up. Great post.
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