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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
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Before criticizing that type of technology, you really should read the article, you know. You might learn a thing or two.
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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?
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?
Your mom's basement.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
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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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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Or, you can just store the energy in batteries, and use them at night.
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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
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
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.
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.
Most solar thermal plants use some medium that the sunlight heats up. That medium is pumped close to the bottom of a water tank to generate your steam. The thing is that the sun heats up the stuff a lot, and you can store that medium in a well insulated tank. You can then pump it from that storage tank to the boiler after the sun goes down. Even the early versions setup in California in the 70s did this, and that plant is still running today; albeit with some upgrades. Beyond that, as another commenter pointed out, using some electricity to electrolysize(sp?) water into hydrogen to be burned in an ICE or better yet used in a fuel cell would get you power after hours just fine.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
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 know, sometimes it helps to RTFA. One of the specific advantages of this type of system is that the energy of the sun is not directly converted to electricity, as it is with solar cells. Rather, the energy is used in the form of heat, which in turn is used (via heating a fluid) to drive a generator. That means that you don't need to store electricity - you need to store heat so that the heat can be used to drive the generator during times when the sun is not available. The article specifically mentions using oil or molten salt to store the heat. Heat up oil or molten salt, store it in well insulated containers, and it will stay hot for a very long time. When you need it, you run the hot oil or salt through a heat exchanger, extract the heat and generate more electricity - all while the sun is on the other side of the planet.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Read up on power losses on high power transmission lines and superconductors; then you'll understand how they make sense in limited installations.
- Mike
Once you've lost your temper, you've lost the argument - Me
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.
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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.
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