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Tech That Will Save Our Species - Solar Thermal Power
NoMoreCoal writes "Salon has up a story by Joe Romm, former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, discussing a lesser-known alternative energy solution. It's a technology that (he claims) is ready to provide zero-carbon electric power big, fast, cheap and (most importantly) right now: solar thermal power. 'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. CSP makes use of the most abundant and free fuel there is, sunlight, and key countries have a vast resource. Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources.'" Interesting stuff, even if he does mention the Archimedes Death Ray.
The difference between solar thermal power and more well-known solar photovoltaics.
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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!
... and without the radioactive waste.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
My guess would be that it would cost less than the Iraq war. Sounds like a good deal, no?
I think it's quite interesting that a lot of the poorer, indeed third world [LOL - Australia ;-)], countries of today could be the power suppliers of tomorrow. Of course that will depend to a large degree on them stopping killing each other long enough to allow the current rich nations to come in and setup the plants!
The problem then becomes one of supply - how do you get the Solar Thermal riches of the Sahara up to Europe without massive power losses. There was a Chinese scientist 5 or 10 years ago who put forward an idea for a "Super Grid" to allow us to move power around the globe more efficiently. Maybe this needs a bit more thought!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Before criticizing that type of technology, you really should read the article, you know. You might learn a thing or two.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
so we simply build it *on top of* new jersey. it's about the right size, plus there's no wildlife anywhere in NJ to displace. as for the locals, who cares? it's fucking new jersey. the power can then be transmitted directly to new york city. i mean, sure theres *supposed* to be enough power to go around, but when has NYC ever fell short on a challenge to guzzle resources?
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No, it doesn't.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
For us humble taxpayers, yes, but won't somebody think of the weapons industry?
Check the summary again. It says "equivalent", not one big 92x92 plot of technology. If the solar fields could be made smaller, but many more spread out over the region, you could get the same effect as if it were one large setup.
I heard about this on NPR last week, and this same concern was brought up. No one is saying that they are going to make such a huge array (can you imagine the need for maintenance workers?). However, if there are enough arrays created, it can be the functional equivalent of the 92x92 field spoken about.
Thunder
No
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.
Your mom's basement.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The problem with this plan is that it doesn't scale out. It's subject to the Windmill effect, where it's contesting with other uses for land, and eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape.
We need to move our solar power generation to space. Something along the lines of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite
Except that this, too, does not scale.
However, if we modified the satellite to act as a go-between rather than as a primary collector, and placed our solar panels in orbit around the sun rather than in orbit around the earth, that would scale out indefinitely. By the time we ran out of room to grow, we'd have a Dyson sphere and be capturing the radiant energy output of the entire sun.
This is what we should do. If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
What 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
Has anyone even read the summary? It says plants. That means more than one.
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid
There are some pictures of the German plant here.
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
Nuclear is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. There's still a few major issues I see with nuclear:
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
I know that other countries have made nuclear work (France is the most cited example.) However, those countries have been able to regulate the plants more closely without conservatives jumping all over their governments for 'promoting socialism' and 'over-regulation'. Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future plants can improve efficiency - through improved design/scale - to drop the price to between 6 & 8 cents.
Yea, a german solar power plant bought up Nanosolar's entire production for the next 24 months. Grrrr.
NS solar tech is much cheaper than current solar tech- As in 50k->30k for putting solar power in your 2000sq' house (45 year vs 25 year payoff-- but that assumes no more inflation-- with historical inflation more like 22 vs 12 year payoff).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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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Is there enough material on the face of the earth to construct a Dyson sphere? Oh, and just to ask that question, I had to dig through three layers of ridiculousness. Are you sure you're not after a sci-fi forum?
I hate printers.
Not necessarily: We could give monetary incentive to buildings' owners to operate heliostat mirrors on their roofs toward energy company's solar tower (there can be even a competition between various "sun buyers" in single area, a multiple choice for aiming-for-dollars) and homesteads already occupy a lot of land.
Your space plan is, of course, better for all the good reasons, but we are not there yet.
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)
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... and placed our solar panels in orbit around the sun rather than in orbit around the earth, that would scale out indefinitely Come on! We just need to plug the wire directly into the sun!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!
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.
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2) No doubt it would change the local environment, but considering it's currently desert the change would probably improve conditions for local wildlife. Add shade, decrease ground temperatures, maybe even help retain moisture in the soil.
3) High voltage DC transmission can send electricity thousands of miles while maintaining acceptable losses. About 5% per 1000 miles. You can't do it with AC because such long cables have huge capacitance that makes reversing the voltage 60 times per second rather difficult. Also, there's less issues with synching the AC waveform with whoever it's connected to - local inverters do that. Why not simply build a nuclear powerplant closer to the consumers? 1) NIMBY - everybody wants it but yet nobody wants it.
2) Waste is still an issue, since the USA is scared shitless to reprocess nuclear waste (it's actually illegal in this country thanks to anti-proliferation legislation).
=Smidge=
This estimate for solar power does not include transmission losses, and assumes you can losslessly transmit power from mexico to alaska (which is a location where you couldn't place this power station).
... (high estimate includes a demand growth of 3.5% per year, which is the expected value if energy prices remain constant at higher demand, which is presumably what you want to do, especially since the alternative is letting people freeze)
So in practice, even today, we'd need at least 120% of the stated figure. If all in one plant we'd need 300%.
So you need 12200 square miles for to even start.
Note that this is already bigger than some states. Let's perhaps put this in a better perspective : this would take 0.3% (low estimate) of the surface area of the united states, 1% for the bad estimate.
How long could one do this ? Well in 235 years the entire surface area of the United States would be necessary to generate energy (again : low estimate).
Half of the surface area would be used in 200 years. A small table :
Year - Area Used (low estimate) - (high estimate)
2008 - 0.3 - 1
2055 - 1 - 5
2084 - 2 - 15
2120 - 5 - 50
2141 - 10 - 100
By contrast, energy generation by new generation nuclear power plants will last, with the large growth, over 600 years, with current technology, with thorium reactors, with negligeable surface area used. In that time, they will generate only 500 tons of problematic waste, ie. nothing we can't handle. And if we still don't have fusion power by then, well, then nobody can say we didn't give the scientists as much time as possible to study it.
And obviously, nuclear power works in Alaska too. Alaska receives only 16% of solar energy, so to power alaska you'd need an 8x bigger solar station.
Grids are expensive and security risks. A decentralized power system would be much more economically efficient, more resilient to regular local outages caused by weather storms, and much more competitive in offering consumers lower prices. Grid = Monopoly. It's economically efficient to transport oil and gasoline by tankers and by semi truck to decentralized filling stations.
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready. The market certainly won't be ready, won't be competitive, if you are building "super grids". That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents (just like ethanol farmers and processing plants).
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Of course, it begs the question: How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?
;)
When they say '6 to 8 cents per KWh', it generally covers construction, O&M costs. Resources generally abstract out to dollar costs.
Basically, they generally assume you get a loan with a payoff duration of the expected lifespan of the plant. Say 20 years. They figure O&M will cost so much per year, and so many KWh will be produced. Simple division gives you O&M cost per KWh. Then you figure in the annual loan payments*. Divide and you get an expected infrastructure cost for the plant per KWh. Add the two. 6-8 cents per KWh isn't actually that bad. It'd be economical in California, for example, if not quite there for North Dakota(besides the whole 'less sun' thing).
Let's do a bit of comparison with what I think we need more of, nuclear plants.
$1 Billion, 1 Gigawatt plant. 90% load factor. Let's say 4% interest, plant life 40 years.
The interest and capital will be $50 million per year. (4.18M per month)
Random webpage says $50M for Operations
NEI says 1.26 cents per KWh, including fees for eventual disposal and decommisioning.
We can expect our plant to produce about 8B KWh a year. This translates to $100 million O&M per the NEI. I'll use this one.
This all translates to nuclear being around 1.9 cents per KWh. In comparison, I wouldn't say that this would be economical. Even if you knock the nuclear plant down to 20 years, it only increases the cost pre KWh to 3 cents.
*I often use a mortgage calculator that you can punch in duration, interest rate, and amount and it gives you monthly payments. It's intended for houses, but works equally well for cars and billion dollar nuclear plants.
I don't read AC A human right
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?
Solar is a near perfect power source requiring minimal systems to exploit it, totally renewable and producing no waste. The fact that people in countries with year-round sunshine are heating their water with gas or electricity is ridiculous. The oil and gas people are exploiting their leverage to maintain their monopoly, regardless of the consequences.
Even in the grey UK there are people heating most of their water with solar. I just wish I had the spare cash to set up my own system.
STP is a very common technology here in Brazil, especially in households that use it to heat water to be used in the shower (replacing our famous electric shower heads). Some industries also use it to pre-heat water that they use in the manufacturing process, saving millions of dollars every year. -vava
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Argument by fear. In the entire history of civilian nuclear power in the US there has been one major accident which didn't kill anyone, this is far better than virtually every other industry in the country. If you were to apply the same irrational argument to other parts of the infrastructure society would grind to a halt.
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure ( such as a train station or airport ). Furthermore if terrorist attacks are an issue then a few nuclear power plants are relatively easy to guard and difficult to attack. It is also unlikely a terrorist organization that had the ability to launch a sufficiently fierce attack would pick a nuclear power plant as a target since there are far more vulnerable sites available.
The angle of the sun is a huge problem specifically for the reason you state. The larger, the more atmosphere, and the less energy you get. Also the larger the angle, the less hours of sunlight you get, and therefore, even less energy. The best place for this would be in the tropics, in the middle of a desert, so as not to be obstructed by clouds. Looks like the middle east will still have lots of energy, even if we move to system like this.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Energon cubes?
With Pebble Bed reactors, nuclear power has a great future:
:)
1. Yes, but it's easy to store pebbles (they're sealed in graphite, waterproof, and can just be loaded into barrels and put underground. They're also rather small (the size of a tennis ball).
2. Pebble Bed reactors can't melt down. If they get too hot, they generate less heat, resulting in an abandoned reaction stabilising long before thermal damage can occur in the containment
3. Ignorance will always be a problem
4. Hardly. The level of security at nuclear power plants is ridiculously off the scale. Also, with pebble bed reactors, the pebbles are practically useless for making weapons.
Pebble bed reactors seem to be the way forward. I suggest reading about them to see their benefits. It's interesting stuff.
Hmm, how about using the variable power sources like solar and wind to drive pumps to fill hydropower or compressed-air reservoirs. Power can then be drawn from them at a predictable rate. You'd lose some efficiency, but you could just throw a few more square miles at the problem.
You're kidding, right?
Right now the sunlight hits the dirt, is partly absorbed and reradiated, and partly reflected.
In the proposed system, the sunlight hits a mirror, is mostly reflected to a collector, at which point it is mostly absorbed and reradiated, and partly reflected.
There will be a potentially significant local effect, and a probably mostly insignificant larger effect. The speed at which the heat is reradiated may be a little different.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just to make something even clearer: you should read the article and learn something before recycling canned opinions.
An essential feature of solar thermal power is that it easily and efficiently stores solar energy directly as heat. From the article:
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
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.
As for these big mirrors, deserts have plenty of empty space, and could probably use a bit if shade. In inhabited areas this is going to be a bigger problem. There, solar cells are probably easier: simply cover every roof with them, and you've got plenty of energy without sacrifing any space.
Turns out wikipedia even has a page about solar shingles.
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?
That isn't really a significant concern. There's plenty of empty, sun-drenched space in the desert that nobody wants to use for anything else.
Space-based solar, on the other hand, suffers from a much bigger problem: the cost of launching material into orbit is so outrageously high that space-based solar won't be economically feasible until a major breakthrough (say, a working space elevator) is achieved. And even then -- say, for the sake of argument, that we found a way to launch satellites into orbit for free -- it's not clear to me that the costs of simply maintaining a large fleet of solar power satellites in their orbits wouldn't be significant. After all the analysis, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to harvest solar power on the ground. Yes, you have to harvest more sunlight since its intensity has been reduced by the atmosphere, but on the plus side, when something breaks it's a lot easier to fix it. You also don't have to worry about your power plant accidentally de-orbiting and landing on someone's house...
If we could build such, it would herald a new golden age of mankind
I think that's a great plan for the 23rd century, but we need a plan that will get us through the 21st and 22nd intact, first.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"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
Well, in the case we'd have plenty of hydroelectric ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Forget subsidizing this with tax dollars. I have a few bucks to invest. Let me buy some stock. Or how about some energy bonds? The US sold war bonds during WWII, let us buy Alternative Energy Bonds for investing in solar and geo and fuel cells.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
I 100s of millions , no where near trillion.
It is actually pretty simple to build, doesn't require any new materials, and is simple to maintain.
"More if you factor in the need to store energy overnight and on overcast days."
It's not battery storage, it's hot liquid storage in tanks. Which is released into the turbines on demand.
An area the size of a football field will produce 300 MWatts at the beginning. Cloudy days don't impact this things as much as you would think.
This is NOT solar panels.
About 5 months ago I did a lot of research into this technologies, it looks very promising.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Citation, please. Else, don't cite figures.
Citation, please. Certainly the article cited in the OP didn't make such claims. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you'll be a whole lot more convincing if you'd provide some citations.
In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the war at $500 billion. That was three years ago. Others put the cost at $1 to $2 trillion in 2006. See this article from The Guardian (UK) for details. If you would like to provide some citations refuting these figures, please do so.
And your basis for this claim is...what, exactly?
From the article cited in the OP, "Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours." That covers overnight hours. You'd locate the facilities in areas that typically don't have extended periods of overcast days (e.g., US Southwest, as mentioned in the article). Neither will provide 100% coverage, and so you'll probably still need existing power generation facilities, but they can be scaled back in operation the vast majority of time. What isn't discussed and probably needs to be is whether it is more effective to keep those facilities operating at bare minimum levels vs. come up with some other means to deal with extended poor generation periods.
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.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
I'm both. At least, that's what my paycheck says. When I'm funding something, I'm a taxpayer. When I'm voting on something, I'm a citizen. Seems about right.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
A human being is capable of doing approximately 60 watts worth of work. So for three-shift operation, three people could generate about 50 watts of continuous power. A treadmill takes about two square meters. Mouse scales down in size and if we assume that the drop in power is linear to size we can safely use this 25 watts/sqm for mice also. A square mile is (takes out a calculator and curses the imperial system) approximately 2.56 square kilometers. This would yield about 64 MW of power. My question is, how many mice are needed?
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
You bring up an interesting point... If solar power (and other renewable energy sources) are truly as cheap and effective as supporters say they are, then why aren't we using them?
This comment not directed at parent - it's to the world in general: Just shut up and do it already!
If it works so well, why aren't you already paying $0 for your energy bills?!? Here: BUY SOME! Install them, and then (and only then), come back to slashdot and tell us how well they work, and how you don't pay anything for electricity anymore!
I understand our concern about the larger issue of how "everyone else" gets their energy. The discussion about large-scale renewable energy sources is an important and worthy conversation. But what better way to further that goal than to be an example of how this can succeed by just doing it for yourself?
I'm going to price out some solar panels for my house and see if I can make this work right now. In fact, if it *does* work out, maybe I'll look into buying a patch of land and installing a bunch of solar panels and selling the energy. But here's my concern: I'm not the first person to have thought of this. And solar panels aren't exactly a new invention. So why don't we see a bunch of little, private wind and/or solar energy farms? Is it because it doesn't work on a small scale, but does work on a larger scale? I don't buy that - the relationship between the amount of energy collected and the most significant resource that solar energy collection requires (land) is perfectly linear: One 10x10 solar panel optimally collects x KW/h of energy. y 10x10 solar panels optimally collect x*y KW/h of energy. If it's going to work on a large scale, it *must* necessarily also work on all smaller scales.
Like I said, I'm going to look into doing it for myself, but my suspicion is that the reason we're not all already doing this is because it just doesn't work.
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.
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.
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.
It's 92 miles on a side, or 92x92=8464 square miles.
640 acres per square mile and the Nevada plant is 275 acres, so that's 2.3272 plants per square mile.
So we need 2.3272x8464=19698 of those plants, just like the original post said.
This article says the Nevada One plant cost $250 million to build: http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/7150
$250 million times 19,698 gives just under $5 trillion dollars in construction costs. Now at some point economies of scale will kick in and save us money, and by most accounts maintaining the solar plant is cheaper than constantly paying for more coal or nuclear fuel. But no matter how you slice it, that's a lot of money.
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
1) NIMBY - everybody wants it but yet nobody wants it.
NIMBY? HAHA. My back yard is a freaking Exxon oil refinery. If someone could come through and pave the oil plants in south Louisiana and replace them, all of them, with nuclear plants, I would call him a hero...
Take a look for yourselves, I live just below the giant grey patch on the river.
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I live next to a beautiful lake, in a quiet part of the downtown area. I have a great view, other than the giant plant covering 100% of the horizon.
On wednesdays, I get woken up by the emergency alert tests (think air raid sirens).
About twice a month, the wind blows south, filling the air with the most wonderful rotten-egg stench. (sulfur)
In 2 years I've never seen stars from my home. The lights of the plant turn the night sky a nasty red color for most of baton rouge, and 45 miles away in new roads, la the red glow from the plant covers a quarter of the sky.
I would gladly trade for a nuclear plant and an electric car. When can I sign up?
Here in Spain, the energy companies are forced to buy your surplus at a cost higher than market value. I think it is pretty much the same all around Europe.
And yet not many people install PV. (??)
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.
HTH.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"