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Batteries To Store Wind Energy
Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatt facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009. If this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources."
I hope it's not 9 volt. Those are hard to find.
Why are more utilitys not using something like what beacon power is doing.
Storing energy in flywheels. Spin it up when the wind blows. Draw it off when you need it. They last for a very long time when compared to batterys.
Batterys are kind of high priced for a low lifetime. Require all kinds of nasty chemicals to make and need to be disposed of someday. And take HUGE banks to store what a large flywheel would store.
Seems silly...
This is an old dream, but is has almost always been defeated by economy. And according to the article, it still is, though it is getting better:
[i]But it is expensive, costing roughly $3 million per megawatt plus millions for start-up and testing. "Right now, they're a little too expensive," Novachek says.[/i]
Looking at the numbers, it seems like a small-scale test setup. 7 MWh is not much in an 1100 MW wind turbine facility.
i would have to say that it always blows in the day, however in the evenings and during the night there is seldom any wind.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
i believe some dams release water through the turbines during peak times, then pump it back up off peak at night with excess cheap electricity ready for the next day, is that not a reasonable form of energy storage? i imagine a similar level of energy storage in anything recognisable as a battery would be insanely expensive and/or involve alot of toxic chemicals
I'd pump water UP to store the energy and let it flow DOWN to release the energy.
Granted it might not be as efficient as battery storage but it would be cheap, deploy-able right now, and it can be made as large as needed, plus it can be used to extinguish fires "downhill' and slake thirst.
It doesn't even have to be in the same place as the wind farm. Just in front of it, like in the mountains like the ones that cause the chinooks winds in Alberta.
I can see setting up a mountain top reservoir, filling it with water pumped by excess energy and emptying it when needed.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
MIT's Daniel Nocera is working on fuel cells and solar power as the energy storage, if the economics can be worked out.
Batteries need to be replaced, and are composed of a number of undesirable chemicals. Seems like ultra-capacitors might be of use here. Several orders of magnitude more recharge cycles and generally safer. Portability isn't an issue, so they could be as big and heavy as needed.
sounds like a cool potential battery technology too. The battery element determines the power, and the amount of energy storage is only limited by the size of the tanks.
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/29-the-element-that-could-change-the-world/
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I don't know if this is feasible but I've always thought that a mechanical solution would be better. Use the excess energy to lift a huge weight like the weights on a pendulum clock. When the wind dies down, just let the weight power a generator. Assuming concrete is reasonably environmentally friendly this would be a pretty clean solution.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Some sort of cylindrical container for holding liquids one intends to imbibe?
You'd better patent that before someone else does.
That's being done... with millions of tons of water.
Millions of tons of concrete would be slightly more difficult to handle.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Flywheel energy storage
"Applications
Uninterruptible power supply
Flywheel power storage systems in current production (2001) have storage capacities comparable to batteries and faster discharge rates. They are mainly used to provide load leveling for large battery systems, such as an uninterruptible power supply for data centers.[9]
Flywheel maintenance in general runs about one-half the cost of traditional battery UPS systems. The only maintenance is a basic annual preventive maintenance routine and replacing the bearings every three years, which takes about four hours.[5]"
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Some of you are discussing using a flywheel. Does anyone have some data on the efficiency of that technology versus using this type of battery? My first thought would be that coming up with bearings for a flywheel that can handle the mass of the wheel yet be as close to frictionless as possible would be difficult and expensive to develop and then later to maintain.
As I read this about batteries, I'd love for someone with a lot more experience and knowledge to chime in on potential energy storage as opposed to these chemical/electrical? I would assume it to be a lot less expensive to build/install and maintain over the long term to have the wind (for example) pump water up a tower and then use gravity and water the water coming down to generate electricity. Seems like using the wind to create potential energy could be cheaper (and simple) if we had some ingenious concepts working on that. It would also be better for exporting to real polluting nations like India and China.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Pumped storage is about 60-70% efficient, I wonder how this compares?
In my limited experience of using battery banks (2-4 AAs or Cs in series or parallel), the most common cause of failure is having them in series while charging: small changes in cell chemistry mean that the batteries in a pack don't discharge at the same rate, so when you start charging one battery is at 0% and the other at 20%. This kills the battery that was at 0%. Battery life is extended greatly if you charge every cell individually instead of putting them in series (as most home-grade battery chargers do).
From the diagram, it looks like each module contains hundreds of cells, with the cells connected by busbars. Looks like a recipe for failure to me. What's the secret?
Use that.. 54 megawhat hours of storage
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
If ultra-capacitors become something more tangible than vaporware, I can see this approach becoming much more viable. As it is, with the hidden costs to the environment and economy of chemical batteries, the actual cost-benefit ratio here is a bit more murky, I think.
1,100 megawatts, eh? Why, that's almost 1.21 gigawatts! Now we just need to come up with a flux capacitor and find an old Delorian!
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
In the wind alley, they do a lot of farming, right? Why not create two level reservoirs, one a hundred and fifty feet higher than the other, and then when there is excess production, you pump the lower reservoir into the higher one. Even better, find some underground features that would make it easy to create underground reservoirs with different elevations. And if you hit a hot spot of granite, even better - redirect the steam so it spins some turbines.
Drought presents problems to open air reservoirs. It may actually be cheaper to use superconducting transmission lines to somewhere with better natural features.
If WalMart and Sams Club covered all of the parking lots with solar panels, not only would they reduce localized heat effects, it would probably be enough to power all air conditioning in the south during those hot sunny days. I don't know why any sprawl areas are looking for huge plots of lands to stick solar powered plants on. They have hundreds of square miles of parking lots already, they just need to be leased from the malls and stores.
But, as always, the best way to save energy is still conservation. It's 100% effective and free. Unfortunately there's no profit in efficiency, and thus it's not a political option.
Xcel's total wind power generation has been well over that for many years. (I remember reading about them going over 500 MW a few years ago, although I can't find the source now.) However, Xcel doesn't actually own most of the wind facilities is uses. The one 25 MW facility listed on the page you linked to is probably the only one they wholly own and operate themselves.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
When we put the batteries at the consumer end we have only half the transmission losses, compare to a distributed system like bittorrent.
Now the world seems to embrace the electric car these can, as long as they are connected to the charging point, be excellent buffers for excess energy.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Generate hydrogen and release the energy back using a fuel cell.
Though, I like the distributed storage system idea better. I think that will actually lead to better battery technology faster than almost any other system.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I could swear that was a movie...
Yeah, but the comments here don't make me want to kill people.
If you had read the article all the way through, you'd know that Xcel energy is doing this as well. They have a demo installation for creating and storing hydrogen from excess wind and solar, which they then burn in turbines to recover the energy later.
I was a electronics tech on a submarine and had to deal with our battery bank, 125 or so 2 volt batteries, each about 2 foot by 2 foot, and approx 5 feet tall. They required a lot of maintenance and we always had to worry about something happening causing them to explode (there is a lot of energy in batteries that big) just from that I would say this sounds like a bad idea`
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
The article says the batteries store 7 megawatt hours. Fine.
Then it goes on to say "meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously" WTF does that mean? Power, measured in megawatts is by definition an instantaneous unit. What's with "almost instantaneous". Also, the rate of discharge of a battery MW is unrelated to its storage capacity MWh, so the entire meaning of the sentence makes no sense.
Then the article says, "Over 100 megawatts of this technology [is] deployed throughout the world," Huh? Battery capacity is measured in megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
Then the article says, "costing roughly $3 million per megawatt" same thing. Battery cost must be proportional to megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
I suspect that their idea is to make a battery with 24 megawatt-hours of capacity able to deliver 1 megawatt of power uniformly for 24 hours, then say so.
Shame on Sciam writers and double shame on Sciam editors for not mastering such basic units in an article about energy.
How about a little economics. The article mentions two understandable numbers, an 11 MW wind plant, and 7 MWh of battery capacity. The combination of the two, allowing for wind variations during the day believably deliver 1 MW continuously to the grid. That's 24 MWh per day.
Now the batteries cost $3 million, and the wind generators cost $22 million. Total $25 million to deliver 1 MW of base load. That's $25 billion per GW.
The peak generating capacity of North America is about 750 GW. Let's say 250 GW when levelized to base load. Therefore, to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars. Now Al Gore says, "No problem. We can do that in just 10 years." WTF is he thinking?
Even if we did spend $6.2 T, there will still be periods where not much wind blows for large regions for many weeks at a time. I live where it's cold, and I know that when it hits -30F, the wind is almost always still and the sky dark, and that it can stay like that for a couple of weeks. We therefore, need to double or triple the $6.2T plus more for transmission, to provide backup power sources, plus the means of delivering the energy over large distances.
Wind and solar are wonderful for up to 15-1-20% of the total grid generation and the cost of construction and operations dominate. More than that, and reliability and deliverability of the electric supply become dominant in the economic equation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a fair point - this seems obvious, and I assumed this is how wind turbine based generators were used anyway. Is this actually the first of its kind?
To me, it seems like the problems of making energy and storing energy are different problems and a good way to store energy has applications no matter how it is produced. Obviously a energy source with no carbon footprint is better.
They should be using a thermal energy system. Simply save the electricity as heat and then feed it back later.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I remember coming across a cutaway view of a 50's Gyrobus in an old copy of Popular Mechanics. The idea dates back to the '40s. What was wanted was the 3 minute quick-charge tram for lightly-traveled routes that didn't warrant the expense of overheads. The name hints of the problems you'll encounter mounting a 3 ton flywheel in a 20 ton bus.
Hydrogen is a PAIN.
Hydrogen embrittlement makes storage and transportation a problem as does it's low density.
If you are going to make hydrogen you might as well take the next step and convert it to NH4 and use it for fertilizer or CH4 and use it for fuel. NH4 will also work as a fuel if you want. Both would work in a fuel cell or a gas turbine.
Of course Nuclear doesn't have these problems and if they would allow fuel reprocessing the storage problem would go away as well. As to safty modern western reactors have a great record. And any one that brings up the C word is just spreading FUD since it that disaster would never have been allowed to have been built in the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is not at all feasible. For the 1100MW plant, lets say they use common car batteries to save costs. An average car battery is capable of somewhere around 400A at 12V. Keep in mind that at this discharge level the battery isn't going to last very long. Lets say 5000W for a short period of time. You would need 220,000 batteries to make 1100MW. This ignores all losses, which makes this even more optomistic.
I am aware of one facility that uses batteries to power Fairbanks, as reported some time ago here. But even that facility is not really useful, and Fairbanks is not a huge city- perhaps only 100MW or so.
There are many ideas for storing wind power, but I don't think batteries should be considered an option unless some radical advancements are made. Water electrolysis, pumping water uphill, etc are all much better ideas. But ultimately, storing the amount of power that even a small city uses is a problem which has yet to be solved.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
In this country we don't really have an energy shortage. We have a grid shortage. There's loads of wind and geo thermal and solar and tide energy all in places with feeble grids. That's why for example that texas dude is lobbying to get texas to build grids in the middle of no where. so he can transport his wind energy (to his water pumps but that's another story).
SO the propoer thing to do is not to store wind energy but to send it to consumers AT THE TIME THEY ARE USING THE LEAST POWER. send the ind energy at night when the wind is strong and the grids are unused. Now you don't need as big a grid.
the small existing ones can transport more. and the money you were going to spend for peak loads can be used for the last mile to the wind farms.
consumers can store it in batteries or as heat (electric thermal storage) or make hydrogen fuels, maybe charge the electric car.
give consumers the right to buy the cheapest or greenest power and they will pay for and maintain the batteries.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most nuclear advocates wouldn't even know how to spell safety properly, let alone implement it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Most nuclear advocates wouldn't even know how to spell safety properly, let alone implement it.
Cite?
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In soviet slashdot batteries charge you!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You want to store wind energy with a mechanical solution? Two words: rubber bands. Proof: those little balsa airplanes with the rubber-banded propellers.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Indeed. After all, Chernobyl was in Russia, and everyone knows that any "scientist" from Russia is clearly less intelligent than the thickest high school dropout in America (cough)threemileisland(cough)....
Seriously though, just because Chernobyl is unlikely to occur in the West, or even in Russia these days, it's still a possibility. I think I'd rather get my power from wind turbines and solar, and not live in fear that one day someone cuts one corner to many in the quest to lower costs and I end up glowing in the dark...
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
Hydrogen is a PAIN.
I once saw a hydrogen transport truck in my city. The hydrogen was stored in narrow thick walled tanks on the back of a trailer. It looked very inefficient.
On the other hand you can combine the hydrogen with carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into Methane with almost as much energy density. Then you can transport it with existing infrastructure.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Neutron irradiation embrittlement is a significant problem affecting the pressure vessels (and other components) of nuclear reactors, this is a fundamental issue that limits the lifespan of nuclear reactor by introducing failure modes that include the destruction of the pressure vessel containing the fuel.
Proposed Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (PBMR) are designed with the same reduced containment that Chernobyl was built with. Chernobyl illustrated what happens when it goes wrong with a reactor, that some failure modes of reactors are fatal for many thousands of people. To say that's FUD is patently a way to avoid the facts, especially when gaining a proper understanding of the complexities of the Nuclear industry is essential if it is to evolve past the point where it presents serious operational concerns over it's entire industrial cycle.
Proposed new generation 'once-through' series' reactors, like the AP-1000, are designed with significantly reduced containment. They have been designed this way to reduce the expense of building them, as the sheer volume of concrete required to build a reactor containment building is one of the highest input costs (as well as concrete being the third greatest contributor of greenhouse gasses).
So if a reactor is built in the US to today's abbreviated containment standards, yes, that reactor would include a failure mode similar to what occurred at Chernobyl. That is not FUD, that's a consequence of the design.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
it would not be safe.
Besides you can do your own googling. Hint: read up on Davis-Besse to get you started.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So if a reactor is built in the US to today's abbreviated containment standards, yes, that reactor would include a failure mode similar to what occurred at Chernobyl.
The failure mode at Chernobyl was very specific to the design of the RBMK-1000 and to it being near the end of the core life. The problems at Chernobyl were that it had a positive coolant void coefficient, the reactor was burning Plutonium (delayed neutron fraction of 0.2% versus 0.65% for 235U), the graphite moderator was not thermally coupled to the fuel or coolant, and last but not least, the scram rods increased reactivity at their initial portion of travel - the Chernobyl accident was triggered by an operator scram'ing the reactor.
American light water reactors were design explicitly to have a negative coolant void and temperature coefficient.
FWIW, I do have a degree in nuclear engineering.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I second that sentiment.
Nuclear power is safe, practical (as in we have the technology now), and cheap (if we can get past all the politics surrounding it). The hydrogen economy is coming but not how many imagine. As pointed out in the parent post hydrogen storage is a pain. Storage of pure hydrogen requires large heavy containers which makes transport by anything other than ships very expensive. It would be much cheaper and easier to use the hydrogen to produce ammonia or methane for transport than to try to liquefy it for transport excepting esoteric applications like spacecraft fuel.
I think that nuclear power as a primary energy source is practically inevitable. There is enough nuclear fuel on this planet to last humanity for one thousand years given current technology and energy usage rates. That time could be expanded until the sun consumes the atmosphere if we can figure out nuclear fusion and/or more efficient breeder fission reactors.
I see great things in wind power and energy storage technologies such as the battery project in TFA. I also see great problems with wind power, even with load balancing technologies like batteries, pumped hydroelectric, and flywheel storage. With a nice mix of wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear we can have cheap and safe energy.
As long as oil and natural gas is less than or on parity with its competition in either energy or money returned on investment (both of which are linked) we will continue to drill for more. I'm not generally opposed to drilling for oil but if the goal is to no longer drill for our liquid fuels then we need to find viable means to produce our fuels from things like wind and nuclear power. Luckily for us we already have the technology we just need to make it cheap. The best way (IMHO) to make liquid fuels cheap is by economies of scale. Build large nuclear power plants to crack hydrogen from water. Build large methane, ammonia, and synthetic fuel plants to use the hydrogen. Once we have the synthetic diesel fuel and gasoline (cheaper than we can get it out of the ground) we can stop importing it from countries that don't like us so much.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Think big.
Take a million car batteries. Yup, lead acid. Why a million car batteries? Because they're so cheap -- we made a hundred million of them last year, and they're one of the best recycling stories out there). Don't be clever. New tech means R&D, and that means unexpected surprises.
Store them in buildings which are above 50 degrees F so that they last a very long time (and certainly not conditions under a hood). Some place near a large interconnect.
Use an inverter, or, just hook the batteries up with IGBT switches to "thermometer" up the voltage, and then back down, making AC.
I'm aware that this is limited storage; the batteries don't like to run at load capacity for long. But also note that Fairbanks has, I believe, 25 megawatts of battery backup.
I'll throw this into the "fresh meat" bowl here ...
-- Dave Small
this might sound a bit stupid .. but isn't storage of energy completely independent of its source be it wind, hydro etc.
or is there something special or uniquely challenging about storing wind energy i am not aware of ?
I can't stop thinking about how the wind energy generated at low energy consumption times would be perfect for generating the hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells. There is an energy surplus that would be going nowhere, and hydrogen generation requires more energy than it produces. If only hydrogen fuel cells were "here".
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
I am so sick of science writers who mess up the story because they don't understand the units of energy and power.
The article says the batteries store 7 megawatt hours. Fine.
Then it goes on to say "meaning the 20 batteries are capable of delivering roughly one megawatt of electricity almost instantaneously" WTF does that mean? ...
Had you bothered to read the rest of that sentence you'd have seen where the writer said that the batteries would provide one megawatt of electricity for seven hours which is the battery capacity of 7 MWh.
I am confused as to why this is news. Are the utility companies dumber than dirt? Using battery storage systems is an integral part of any DIY wind generating facility, and is just basic common sense.
Additionally, just because you live in a place that may not be appropriate for wind generation doesn't mean that the place where this wind farm is isn't. Wind won't be the only answer to our energy problems and the article doesn't try to make that claim. There are numerous solutions, none are cheap because it means creating new infra-structure. But the infra-structure we have wasn't cheap to build either. It just occurred over a longer span of time.
Once this country and other countries bite the bullet and begin establishing the infra-structure the rewards will far outweigh the initial costs. Lastly, a solar plant could be built in Nevada or another neighboring state today that could provide 100% of the US electricity needs ( a solar farm the size of DC ought to do it, but I'll leave the math proof as an exercise. Anyone can google for commercial solar panels and calculate what the total surface area would take. The cost would be huge naturally, and of course you'd have logistical nightmares and a single point of failure configuration. But it could be done, so your strange, non-scientific, 15-1-20% (WTF is that?) doesn't even come close. Where's your cite for that crazy percentage?
Ok, I should have been more specific. I was referring to the containment structure, and a loss of containment from that structure.
Which in itself is a serious concern for that design. But, IIRC, they scram'd it *after* they were running tests on the reactor at less than the prescribed turbine power output (250Mw vs 750Mw) which didn't allow enough time for the diesel generator/coolant pumps to start operating as the turbine pump(s) wound down. i.e the (excessively) high positive void coefficient was caused by running the tests outside of the specification for the tests and not enough light water was present in the reactor core to prevent the control rod insertion contributing to the reaction running away. Begs the questions, if they could have prevented the disaster had they realised what was happening sooner and were able to carefully increase the light water supply, if the core was damaged by the 'tests' (because I think some control rods jammed) and, more importantly, how such a serious operational error was ever allowed to occur.
In any case, my point is that if Chernobyl had a reasonable containment facility maybe the accident would not have had such serious consequences due to human error, and why reducing a robust containment facility for economic reasons in proposed American reactors is not wise.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
How? Are the mine tailings safe, the processing of the ore cheap and is enrichment suddenly not so carbon intensive? What about de-commissioning of the reactor cores, is that cheap. What about plutonium storage, is that practical yet and the left over U238, found a practical use besides weapons and aircraft counterweights yet.
And since there is no real net-energy gain it's perfectly reasonable to say commercial Nuclear Power is unsafe, not-practical, expensive and a pointless waste of resources that is distracting us from real long term solutions that might actually work and not have the issues nuclear has. Nuclear might have a place, one day, when our materials technology has advanced enough to resolve many of the issues that the first 50 years of nuclear operation has uncovered.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
With standard PWR's and BWR's, the coolant is the moderator and any increase in voids will reduce reactivity. This would be especially true for the AP-1000 at the beginning of core life.
As for containment, I have heard no plans to reduce containment to the levels of the RBMK-1000's - at least in the US. Containment design prior to TMI was predicated on an radio-iodine release several orders of magnitude higher than is likely to happen from a loss of coolant accident.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Who the hell reads the comments on digg?
zosxavius photography
Like everybody else the nuclear power people have promises that are 5 years away... Unlike most others, building that next gen plant will take a decade and cost a crazy amount of money and not prove itself for likely 10 more years. They've had decades of time and billions in welfare money around the world to maintain, build, dispose and enhance nuclear power. The time is up. Many of us will no longer be suckered.
Nuclear power operates at crazy costs and the risks prevent it from being a private venture; therefore, government has to do it then hand it over to private control then provide free regulation and waste storage etc. It always has been too expensive without government covering the costs (while letting private management walk off with profits from our tax money... Yes, if it was fair, they'd pay us back-- but then they'd not be in business either...)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Well I did say If I Recall Correctly. According to the wikipedia article about the accident there were several contributing factors. I don't study it for a living, so maybe I've missed something. The reaction was inhibited by xenon poisoning because the reactor was unintentionally reduced to less than 10 percent of it's output and the operators almost completely removed the control rods, and then
Slowly, the reactor's power only increased to 200 MW, less than a third of the minimum required for the experiment. Yet the experiment was continued.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm simply pointing out that there are several seemingly insignificant contributing factors here, the most significant being the human factor overriding the safety systems.
The point is the reactor blew up because the operators were digging an incident pit, to which no industrial system is immune.
I didn't say it was.
But that's the point isn't it, how containment design is influenced now and that even American reactor's aren't immune to their own incident pit.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not even close. I remember compressed-air storage schemes being touted back in the '70s. The problem then, as now, is the cost which is the problem with all this alternative energy crap.
That's why there's so much emphasis is on how we'll all die soon if we don't embrace stupid energy; on a cost basis they all sucks so proponents have moved the issue to one in which cost is insignificant.
Matter of fact, every alternative energy scheme is a retread. They've all been around forever and they were all thrust aside by the likes of coal, nuclear and hydro.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Which is why the Three Mile Island reactor could never have lost its coolant water, could never have had its core partly exposed, and could never have come within minutes of breaching containment?
We're talking about FAILURE mode here, not design mode.
Of course it depends on how you define "failure mode", but a reactor core open to air and out of control at Chernobyl and a reactor core open to air and almost out of control at TMI sounds pretty similar to me.
And in fact, the Chernobyl accident was caused by operators disabling its safeties and pushing the reactor beyond its safe limits - for a military experiment. The act of scramming was only the initiating event, not the cause.
Bah. The most "dangerous" incidents in the country have hurt how many people? Compare this to ANY other significant form of power. How many have died at coal and oil-powered plants, hydroelectric dams, etc.? Not to mention the illnesses and deaths due to pollution, including release of radioactive particles (particularly from coal).
And, of course, there's also the fact that modern reactor designs are as much safer than DB and TMI as those reactors are safer than Chernobyl -- and even the Chernobyl accident required a combination of bad maintenance, improper operation and deliberate disabling of safety devices.
Nuclear power is the cleanest, safest power source we have.
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Compressed air is another means of storing wind energy that is getting looked at again. The CAES schemes need large geological structures such as salt mines or depleted gas fields, but there are quite a lot of viable structures in places like Texas and Ontario where there is also interest in wind energy. It is not economical on a small scale since a large part of the compression cost is independent of the reservoir size.
According to the US Department of Energy "nearly two-thirds of the natural gas in a conventional power plant is consumed by a typical natural gas turbine because the gas is used to drive the machine's compressor. In contrast, a compressed-air storage plant uses low-cost heated compressed air to power the turbines and create off-peak electricity, conserving some natural gas."
In the last 20 years only two facilities have ever been built - a 110-megawatt plant in Alabama and a 290-megawatt plant in Germany. Iowa is building a new plant "expected to cost $200 million and operate by 2011 with the capacity to store 200 megawatts of power, enough for several days. Both the Iowa and Alabama installations can draw air to make power within 15 minutes and make a gas turbine roughly 40 percent more efficient. "
http://www.eere.energy.gov/de/compressed_air.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081224-full-of-powerful-wind-bury-it-in-the-ground-for-later.html
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/553702
http://www.isepa.com/index.asp Iowa Stored Energy Park
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-178929.html
In soviet slashdot batteries charge you!
How much do they charge, and can I get a discount on my power?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
But it could be done, so your strange, non-scientific, 15-1-20% (WTF is that?) doesn't even come close. Where's your cite for that crazy percentage?
He left that as an exercise. WTF? Are you a math professor or something?
Lastly, a solar plant could be built in Nevada or another neighboring state today that could provide 100% of the US electricity needs ( a solar farm the size of DC ought to do it, but I'll leave the math proof as an exercise.
His statement is about as crazy as you saying we should use the state of Nevada for a solar farm.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
I get the scalability factor here - every new windplant comes with the necessary storage - but in total battery capacity this seems wasteful. The batteries are better downstream, closer to the electricity's ultimate destination. The transmission losses can be significant so why not store the lesser amount of energy close to the last mile instead of at the start before the transmission losses?
As a specific example the windfarms near Palm Springs and the Arizona border power many homes and businesses in LA. "Edge caching" the power nearer to the energy's endpoint could cut back battery costs significantly here.
Just so you know, from what i've seen, the math works out to something along the lines of: if we built enough wind towers to supply every watt of power needed by every human on earth, the earth would gain a SOLID second, not a leap second, in 10,000 years. yea, I think i'll skip the panic.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
But no, you couldn't do that, you had to jump in there and get that first post karma. Then, when someone called you on your bullshit you shuck and jive and change the subject to the fact that the reactor operators at Chernobyl dug themselves an incident pit in an attempt to shift attention from the fact that your initial claim, to wit that the AP1000 and AP600 reactors have similar containment structures to the RBMK series, is total bullshit.
In short you're ignorant and full of shit and you got called on it and rather than stand up and admit that you were full of shit you instead attempt to change the subject.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I didn't say we "should". I said we "could". Not to mention that the state of Nevada is a mite bigger than DC. An 8 square mile tract of desert in Nevada isn't going to be a big deal, but could do a lot to relieve our dependency on oil and coal.
I don't know. The last estimate I heard for the government "bailout" for our failing economy was $8 trillion. When the government is throwing around billions and trillions of dollars at a whim (throwing it at people who have proven that they have no business touching other people's money) what is another $6.2 trillion toward something that might actually be beneficial? ;-)
$6.2 trillion just doesn't sound as big as it once did, and hyperinflation will make that even more true soon enough.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Flywheels have been around for decades and I was wondering that myself. My neighbor is a mathematician who worked designing flywheels, which when I found out promptly inquired. Apparently they're always breaking down, which takes the entire windmill out of operation. The engineering strength required for these is pretty expensive so they either cut corners or build breakage prone flywheels. Think of the weight necessary to store the energy which needs to be supported for the duration that energy is stored. It needs a large triple thread with bearings so that rather than spin down, it will turn its central axle which takes over the energy production. It also requires a complex clutching mechanism so that it will engage/disengage when it's at the bottom/top of it's lifting range. It's a good idea, just not affordable because of the engineering requirements. I say we drill and go nuclear. Nuclear for the grid, petro/ng for our cars.
Thanks for the rest of the analysis, but:
to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars
USA spent over a trillion dollars on non-renewable energy a year (DOE reports), much of that goes to clueless klepto/auto/theo-cracies overseas and bastard oil companies. So, spending $600 billion a year to reduce that seems a pretty good deal on economics without even considering the pollution and employment stimulus benefits. Of course that trillion+ is more than just electricity, USA "only" spent 368 billion for electricity in 2006 (RAND report). But a smart grid powered by renewables goes hand-in-hand with switching transportation from fossil fuels to recharging battery and hybrid vehicles.
=S
When you compress air it gets hot. A lot of the work you do goes to heat. As it cools, the pressure drops. The net effect is a huge loss of efficiency.
If you can pressurize it and keep it from cooling off, you can get more of the energy back.
Anybody got the figures for compressor efficiency?
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I was having a perfectly reasonable and civil conversation until you came along and stuck your illiterate thoughtless 2 cents in. Try reading my thread properly before your little, stoned, addled mind hits 'submit', Fucktard.
1. IIRC, the sequence of events that occurred at Chernobyl. i.e If I Recall Correctly the events leading up to the Chernobyl disaster, i.e I don't care why it blew up - it fucking blew up - and there was no containment building. 2. I compared proposed PBMR designs with RBMK. You know, graphite covered fuel kernels, helium gas cooled, no containment building required. 3. I said 'Proposed new generation 'once-through' series' reactors, like the AP-1000, are designed with significantly reduced containment.' - where in that separate paragraph did I compare them with RBMK?. Answer, you were so wasted on whatever you were smoking you saw it that way.It's the first time I've ever said IIRC and some fuckwit like you decided to use it to attack me because they had no valid contribution to make.
And you get to show off your true idiotic nature.
Where did I make that comparison, lay off the pot multiplexo - you are smoking it too much.
Ignorant people like you defend nuukler bower and reveal your inability to gather even the most rudimentary facts about the end to end operation if the Nuclear Industry. Fanboy shrill-shills, such as yourself, are always there ready to attack anyone who make the vaguest criticism of the Nuclear Power Industry whilst unable to make any objective defence of the industry without resorting to the ad-hominem attack.
I've never seen nuclear advocacy make an objective arguments that stands up to analysis. When presented with the facts your arguments fold or you become abusive, and now, even properly reading what someone has written is too much to ask. I've endured your type of tiresome ignorance for so many years in an attempt to raise awareness of the need to drive some serious industry wide improvements into the Nuclear Industry. That we need to analyse the last 50 years of operation and confront the serious issues which, if you make a realistic and honest assessment of the Nuclear Industry, are there, so we can move forward.
I have supported research into better reactor technology so we can address plutonium disposal pragmatically, but even the most rudimentary step forward, establishing a geologically stable granite containment facility, is impossible with people like you around. Fuck you, I may as well be 'anti' because even the most pedantically checked critical post is seen as 'anti', and I still get a serve from the 'anti's. Whilst you stick your ignorant dumb ass belligerent head in the sand, pretend everything is a-ok, and get fucked by propaganda. Fucking think for yourself you Pwnd fucking sheep, WAKE UP.
Once upon a time, IIRC, I read someone post
I wanted to refer to fanboy's as 'shrills' in reference to the loud unpleasant noise they make, but the word 'shill', 'one who participates in a swindle to dupe others' was equally appropriate. But now I have made up a new word that, whilst sounds old, is new and describes your kind precisely multiplexo,
fan; describing an overly enthusiastic supporter of a cause,
boi; which in Portuguese means; a c
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Thank you. I am so sick of people using Chernobyl to dam Nuclear power in the US and other western nations.
I sure don't have a degree in nuclear engineering but the to be honest the difference between a light water reactor and the RBMK-1000 is pretty easy to see.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Chernobyl is unlikely to occur in the West," .5 deaths.
No it is IMPOSSIBLE.
TMI killed nobody. it damaged the reactor but the best estimate of added cancers from the released radiation was
That has been no statistic spike in cancer deaths from that area to this day.
Russia has a lot of great scientists and engineers. They just got over ridden by political leaders all too often in the past.
Wind and solar are not now practical. They are a supplement and I am all for using them but if you want to cut carbon today, cut oil use today, you better start building reactors today.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The set of circumstances that led to Chernebyl itself may well be extremely unlikely, maybe even impossible, but a similar sized disaster is sadly not.
Just 10 or so years ago, Sizewell had a sizeable near-miss; were it not for good training, procedures and sheer luck, half of southern england would be a bit inhospitable now...
My point i that although I see no major problem with it's use as a backup, nuclear should not ever be the mainstay of an energy policy
Renewables are safe and with the correct investment, practically free (in the extreme long term; it's been estimated that a properly run solar site would cost 1% of its output over a 25 year period). Only problem with them i you need a lot of them, and people need to stop wasting power wily-nily. The days of cheap abundant electricity are coming to a close. You can either have cheap (renewable) or abundant (nuclear). Not both. A combination of the two, with a heavy emphasis on green power over nuclear is what we need; as I said, here we're already on track for 50% green by 2020.
I doubt the US, the world's supposedly "richest" nation is near that yet.
Point of fact, aside from storm damage, I can't remember the last time we had a power cut or a black out. Think the last service-restrictions we saw were in the '70's before I was born.
Perhaps you should think on that...
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
And since there is no real net-energy gain
What in the world do you mean by "no real net-energy gain"? Do you realize that by making such a claim you're sinking your own argument?
it's perfectly reasonable to say commercial Nuclear Power is unsafe, not-practical, expensive and a pointless waste of resources that is distracting us from real long term solutions that might actually work and not have the issues nuclear has.
No, it's not perfectly reasonable. Nuclear power is extremely safe, better for the environment than coal and, IMO, hydroelectric dams. It's proven practical in plenty of countries and is obviously profitable to them. The waste issue can be minimalized and solved with breeder reactors and other technologies. Given all of these, it's NOT pointless, but you're crazy to suggest that anyone is arguing that it's a long-term solution. It's obviously a medium-term solution that will fit into a broader energy plan for the US and other developed countries well into the future. I expect to see nuclear providing a boost to our base load power 10-20 years from now, and hopefully dwindling off by the end of the century.
I think it's reasonable to say that current nuclear reactor designs are safe, reliable, and efficient enough to help sustain our society until we develop even better sources of energy. I'd die happy if I saw cold fusion and entirely renewable energy being used throughout the world, but for now I'd just like to avoid brownouts.
Nuclear might have a place, one day, when our materials technology has advanced enough to resolve many of the issues that the first 50 years of nuclear operation has uncovered.
Let me fix that for you. Nuclear might NOT be needed one day, when our materials technology has advanced enough to make nuclear obsolete.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Well Shawn, should I consider the mining, and enrichment process? What about containment (or lack of)? or are you talking about a narrow 'just the day to day running of the plant' type incident? But since nuclear powers externalities and pollutants persist well beyond a run of the mill power plant and accumulate up the food chain how do we know how many people Chernobyl or TMI are *still* killing? It's not as if the isotope has a little flag on it saying "this strontium 90 was brought to you by an accidental venting that occured from a reactor half way across the country"
I'm talking about cancer Shawn. Isotopes analogue elements that our bodies seek from food producing different cancers, radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or radium 226 that causes bone cancers. Care to describe what xenon, argon or krypton decay into and the health side effects of those elements once ingested? What about iodine 131 or ceasium 137?
Over what timescale Shawn? a minute, a day, a week a year. If, of the 7 million deaths from cancer this year, a million of them came from nuclear industry externalities, is it less of a disaster because it took those people 15 years to die? Of course conveniently there is no data available. Radioactive isotopoes escape from *whatever* part of the nuclear industry (could be mining, DU dust) who knows? and it's injested, hey it's an alpha emmiter, bingo, cancer. What percentage of yearly cancer deaths will you attribute to the Nuclear industry, 10%, 5% 1%, pick a number Shawn because we can be certain that it's above 0%. If of the millions of people that die from cancer each year (worldwide 58 Million this year), is it somehow less because they didn't actually have anything to do with the nuclear industry at all?
Bah it's ok, it's a future generations problem isn't it Shawn? NIMG. One hunder years after all these reactors stop functioning how radioactive wil they be? What containment will still function? What about two hundred or three hundred years, four five, six hundred years? Even at 1% of today's numbers for cancer, every year how big are those numbers?
Bah, it's all speculation though isn't it Shawn, it's ok, go back to your affluent lifestyle, it's ok to tax future generations, don't have any concerns for your kids, they will be fine. They will sort the problems out, they won't blame you.
Oh, it's a fact is it? How are they safer Shawn, why don't you enlighten me exactly how they are safer and exactly where the 'modern' reactors you describe are. Tell me why 41 of the nuclear power reactors licensed by the NRC (AEC) experienced year-plus outages to restore safety levels (10 reactors did it twice). Tell me how you know better than the US House Committee on Government Operations who concluded (of nuclear reactors);
Mismanagement was a problem during construction. Mismanagement was a problem during operation. Mismanagement will be a challenge during construction and operation of new reactorsJust how are you going to fix that?
No, it's the dirtiest, dumbest most energy inefficient way known to man to boil water.
propaganda is a tyrant's tool, used to lead the weak minded so they don't feel the need to ask questions and think for themselves.
Don't be a wooly sheep Shawn, don't be a fanboi.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well Shawn, should I consider the mining, and enrichment process?
What about it? Consider how much uranium has to mined to produce a given amount of energy, and the amount of coal it takes for the equivalent? Not to mention that uranium ore is usually obtained by strip mining, which is much safer than tunneling to the center of the Earth (figuratively speaking, of course).
What about containment (or lack of)? or are you talking about a narrow 'just the day to day running of the plant' type incident? But since nuclear powers externalities and pollutants persist well beyond a run of the mill power plant and accumulate up the food chain, how do we know how many people Chernobyl or TMI
[snip]
what about Three Mile Island? Was there any contamination, at any point, anywhere? No.
IOW, nice straw man.
are *still* killing? It's not as if the isotope has a little flag on it saying "this strontium 90 was brought to you by an accidental venting that occured[sic] from a reactor half way across the country"
Accidental venting? What do you think this is, the Manhattan project? Every single coal plant in the country is gonna have it's boiler split before anything is released accidentally from a nuclear plant, and are going to be followed by the coal plants in the whole world, if what is released is actually remotely dangerous.
I'm talking about cancer Shawn. Isotopes analogue elements that our bodies seek from food producing different cancers, radon 220 that causes lung cancer, or radium 226 that causes bone cancers. Care to describe what xenon, argon or krypton decay into and the health side effects of those elements once ingested? What about iodine 131 or ceasium 137?
WTF, are you doing so as to get a meaningful exposure to those elements, snorting nuclear waste?
Over what timescale Shawn? a minute, a day, a week a year. If, of the 7 million deaths from cancer this year, a million of them came from nuclear industry externalities, is it less of a disaster because it took those people 15 years to die? Of course conveniently there is no data available. Radioactive isotopoes [sic] escape from *whatever* part of the nuclear industry (could be mining, DU dust) who knows?
Unless thee is a tornado in the strip mines, this is a non-issue.
and it's injested [sic], hey it's an alpha emmiter [sic], bingo, cancer. What percentage of yearly cancer deaths will you attribute to the Nuclear industry, 10%, 5% 1%, pick a number Shawn because we can be certain that it's above 0%.
There is also a non-zero number of people who died from lightning strike from a clear sky, what do you propose should be done?
If of the millions of people that die from cancer each year (worldwide 58 Million this year), is it somehow less because they didn't actually have anything to do with the nuclear industry at all?
Bah it's ok, it's a future generations problem isn't it Shawn? NIMG. One hunder [sic]years after all these reactors stop functioning how radioactive wil [sic] they be? What containment will still function? What about two hundred or three hundred years, four five, six hundred years? Even at 1% of today's numbers for cancer, every year how big are those numbers?
Bah, it's all speculation though isn't it Shawn, it's ok, go back to your affluent lifestyle, it's ok to tax future generations, don't have any concerns for your kids, they will be fine. They will sort the problems out, they won't blame you.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
RE:.sig
[SemanticNazi] Grammar Nazis don't care about spelling. [/SemanticNazi]
*ducks really low*
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
I mean when you examine the end to end energy expenditure of commercial nuclear power generation the energy put in is less than the energy extracted. Since energy is the only real currency in the world, not dollars, you want to make sure that over the entire industrial process the amount of joules you extract is more than the amount of joules you put in. A characteristic of Nuclear energy is that it continues to consume energy *after* it has produced energy.
To begin it takes so much energy to get the ore in the first place. 2.4 gigajoules per ton for soft ores and 5.5 gigajoules per ton for hard hard ores. To get a kilogram of uranium you have to process 500 tons of hard ore (as there is almost no soft ore left) - and even that is assuming an extremely optimistic extraction efficiency approaching %50 and that assumes you have a high grade ore. Yet you still have to factor in the energetic remediation of the mine tailing. Like Oil, all the cheap uranium is gone.
Today's reactor design have a roughly 40 year life span. During the early phase of the plants life span most of the operational issues were resolved so that in the reactors middle age it has a relativley trouble free operation. Now that the reactors are approaching the end of thier life span the materials that the reactor were built with are becoming embrittled, corroded, seals begin to fail. It's not efficiency of operation, it's squezing everything you can get because once that reactor is shut down - it's a tomb that cannot be disassembled for ten to a hundred years, good bye profit hello ongoing operational costs, hello cobalt 60, iron 55, tritium, carbon 14 and calcium 41 amongst others, hello ten to fifteen times the energy cost of a coal or gas power plant to dismantle. Who do you think will wear those costs?
Then there is the CRUD - Chalk River Unidentified Deposits, where a lethal combination of highly radioactive fission and actinide elements from leaking fuel rods in the reactor core itself were discovered. Every reactor has it and *safe* dismantling of the 450 odd reactors worldwide will have to deal with a energy expenditure of almost half of the entire facilities construction on the core alone and we havent even started talking about the cooling water and radioactive hydrogen that is just dumped into the ocean. Demolishing a decommissioned nuclear reactor has not successfully been performed safely on a large scale yet. Nuclear industry proponents tout the amount of energy that can be extracted from a gram of Uranium but rarely factor the *Net Energy Return* of the Nuclear fuel cycle, associated infrastructure and the long term storage of toxic waste. Profit only occurs if the taxpayer bares the expense of yet another externality.
And I haven't even mentioned the energetic costs of remediating byproducts from the enrichment process, the transport and infrastructure costs to move 70,000 tons of plutonium or the energetic costs of constructing a geologically stable containment facility in granite like the Swiss are attempting.
How has the amount of subsidies spent in the US on Nuclear Energy been a reasonable investment that has yeilded returns energetic or otherwise.
I'm not suggesting that they are and that's the problem, there is no long term thinking. I am suggesting that developing a long term plan for how to deal with the mess this generation of the N
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I have considered it, and read the science concerning the entire process. I recommend that you educate yourself with matters of importance rather than correcting my spelling.
Now go off and learn about the Net Energy Return of the entire nuclear process.
Frankly your statement is idiotic, to quote the NRC documentation of the incident A significant release of radiation from the plant's auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core. That's coolant is officially recognised contamination. You show a strong desire to be deceived by the man, despite the available evidence.
So where did the steam from the primary cooling system water go when the valve, that caused the accident, was stuck open. Did it dissipate into another dimension. Did the water say to itself 'gee I should be inside the reactor - boi am I gonna be in trouble' or was it evaporated into the atmosphere. I bet that since it was in contact with the fuel rods the "contamination" said to itself, 'boi I should really stay inside today'.
In reality large amounts of contamination were released beyond Nuclear Industry assurances. The gamma radiation monitors on the top of the auxiliary building were not designed to measure such high concentrations and they went off the scale when the accident *began*, the release of contamination went on for several *days*. Estimates were based on thermoluscent dosimeters on the fence and Alpha and Beta emissions weren't even measured.
Because of the weather conditions it was known that emissions from TMI travelled a long way and were measured in Albany, NY. Joeseph Hendrie (former chairman of the NRC) was quoted (at the time) "We are operating almost totally in the in the blind, [Governor Thornburgh's] information is ambiguous, mine is non-existent and - I don't know - it's like a couple of blind me staggering around making decisions." - So if they didn't know, how is it you do?
Expert measurements of radioactive iodine in farm animals nearby revealed Nuclear Industry estimates of contamination released to be 'grossly underestimated'. Radioactive iodine, plutonium, strontium, americurium, 172,000 cubic feet of high level radioactive water, large quantities of krypton 85 and later that year 8 million litres of radioactive water containing tritium that were evaporated deliberately were all part of the toxic cocktail that was released.
IOW, that straw man glows in the dark.
Radioactive gases are vented fortnightly from *every* nuclear reactor as NRC standard policy. Why should these elements be released into the environment under any circumstances let alone as a standard operating procedure? All reactors leak, that's a factor of their operation, the question is "How dangerous?".
And that's before we consider accidental or unauthorised venting.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.