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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.
Also, I love the snippet: "Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources." They should continue, "unfortunately, there are a fair amount of countries that don't have access to the sun. "
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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
We have Kansas and Nebraska farmers who would love to plant wind farms, but no infrastructure to get the electricity they would generate to the consumer.
Is there infrastructure in the southwest to deliver all this electricity that they would generate?
My sources say the east and west half of the country aren't connected in any useful way that would allow the delivery of Nebraska or New Mexico electricity to, e.g., New England.
Answer: No. Instead we have a monkey in the white house who's giving subsidies to grow corn to make ethanol instead of coming up with real solutions.
What is worse, Jews or Mudslums?
Jews kill more people and steal alot of land and resources, but Mudslums are more obnoxious about their religion. They seem to confuse their faith with a real religion. No religion that treats women like that is real.
I guess this is a question for the ages. What do you think?
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.
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!
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.
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.
You're talking about tampering with big money and business by threatening to put another energy source in front of Oil and Coal! Won't happen under our current mindset. Decades down the road, maybe. Right Now: Our leaders are marketing Coal as an alternative - for some unknown reason (pre-existing multi-billion dollar investments and stocks).
... and they die - pretty much every day. Every thing in the great home we call a Universe has a life cycle, and right now, we're in our middle ages. Until people can understand their place in the Universe, we're better off just heading down the path we're on now.
...
Oh, but wait, there's more! You're talking about pitching these ideas to a country who's people still believe, and are led by leaders still emulate, the essence of this place being created by a mythical being - God. God fixes every thing with prayer. God will fix the globe's crisis if we just keep praying. Reality still has not set it in yet.
It's going to take some more naturally occurring global happenings (hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, flooding, ice-melts), and finally an eventual relenting to the factual knowledge that Solar Systems are born
What ever. Ride the global marketing campaign known as Operation Global Impending Doom - AKA Global Warming. Years ago it was called greenhouse gases, you remember right? Those same greenhouse gases that allow the surface temperature to have risen to a habitable state for species growth. Yeah those green house gases. The ones that were 1000 times the level they are now during Earths volcanically active years
I'm all for streamlined energy. Yes. But stop selling it like it's the latest greatest thing that will SAVE THE WORLD. It's not going to happen. In 5 Billion years when our sun swells to the orbit of Mars and consumes every thing in it's path either form heat or from contact, all your efforts will essentially, mean nothing.
What people need to start thinking about is where the hell we're going to go in the next 50 years when the climate here on Earth grows to an uninhabitable state DUE TO NATURALLY OCCURRING GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE - THE SAME CHANGES THAT SHAPED THIS BALL OF ROCK AND WATER THAT ALLOWS YOU TO EAT SLEEP AND BUY MORE STUFF.
'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
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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."
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.
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?
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
Would it be possible to build it in the ocean?
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
...
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)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
RTFA first and then you won't think this is +4 interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Here is a huge database of solar thermal, solar concentrator pictures:
http://pointfocus.com
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
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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....
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
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:
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?
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...
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
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!!!!!).
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
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...
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.
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
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
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 ?
It's a travesty you weren't modded (way!) up. Great post.
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