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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.
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?
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
'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
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
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.
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?
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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.
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
Sure, but it's not very efficient. 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. The fossil / nuclear plants need to be kept hot with the turbines spinning all the time in order to pick up the load immediately, meaning that the practical savings from renewables are much less than the theoretical ones. He liked hydro though.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
They are talking about countries without land to build power plants on. Mountainous, densely populated, etc.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
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
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
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.
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
He liked hydro though.
Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will. Thus, within the limits of ecology, it actually makes an excellent load balancing system - run at full power when power is needed, drop it down to a trickle and let the coal/nuclear plants take the load when it's not needed.
Solar shouldn't be too bad, but most current systems can vary quite widely simply with passing clouds.
One interesting wind idea I saw, rather than having the generators in the tower, instead had air compressors that eventually powered a turbine on the ground. The benefit being that the turbine has a buffer of compressed air to run through before it'll stop generating power during a lull. Allowing them to keep alternate power at a lower readyness level, saving much more money.
I don't read AC A human right
(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...
Just straight using the fissionable materials we currently have access to on earth along with current fuel reprocessing technologies gives us ten thousand years easily.
I'm all for building a space elevator and mining asteroids, but if we decide to solve our energy problems with nuclear fission we can just start building the plants tomorrow.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
"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.
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
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.
When it comes to solar power - that's not just a valid assumption, it's practically a law of nature. Demand is highest during the day, which happens to be the only time solar (thermal or voltaic) can generate power.
Splitting H2O that way isn't a new tech - it's an old one that keeps being rediscovered after being discarded once reality sets in. After you figure in the energy needed to handle the hydrogen (mostly compressors and cooling systems) and the size of the tanks needed (think Hindenburg to power a few square blocks overnight) - it rapidly becomes less attractive. The same thing goes for storing heat - there really isn't (so far as we know to date) a really effective way to store and then extract the heat in the quantities required.
The OP has it backwards, solar (thermal or voltaic) is best for peaking loads.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
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...
Okay, we use about 100 quadrillion BTUs of power a year, that's would be about 3 terawatts of installed power. Wikipedia claims that the installed cost of coal is 1 to 2 dollars per watt, which means that it would cost 3 to 6 trillion dollars to replace our energy production capacity with new coal plants today.
In comparison, the wikipedia article on thermal solar plants claims that most plant designs aim to achieve $1 per kWh/year (that makes the installed cost about $10/watt). Using the $10 figure, you get an installed cost 30 trillion dollars.
"First, the reference to the 92x92 mile grid says "Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest..." You might note that "plants" is plural. So we're not talking a single 92x92 mile plant, but a large number of plants that cover an equivalent area. However, it's unclear how large an individual plant in this scheme would be vis a vis the ones in operation today."
I was refering to the 3 gigawat plant metioned in the article. the largest they've proposed building was around 100 mw. Is it really possile to build one thirty times larger? I have never seen a design that big.
"Others put the cost at $1 to $2 trillion"
That's because they are conuting secondary effects, like health care and disability. That is hand waving. I could make wild claims about the oppurtunity costs associated with solar too (there's a lot you could accomplish with that $30 trillion, and what about the environmental effects? that aluminum has to come from somewhere), but you don't see me making up numbers and adding them to my cost to make it more compelling. I will stick with the congressional budget, thank you very much.
If this didn't elude you why did you make an issue out of what is a non-problem? It seems like little more than nitpicking to me.
Also, these wouldn't have to be regulated to just the south west. The could be built across the entire southern US. The sunlight doesn't shine any brighter in the deserts. It's simply choice land for this kind of project because of the relatively low cost of land. Building this in downtown San Antonio doesn't make sense. But areas between San Antonio and Brownsville are probably just as good as, if not better than, many locations in New Mexico.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
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.