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Expanding the Electricity Grid May Be a Mistake
Perhaps T. Boone Pickens was onto something. Al writes "An article in Technology Review argues that plans to string new high-voltage lines across the US to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, could be an expensive mistake. What's needed instead are improved local and regional electricity transmission, the development of an efficient and adaptable smart grid, and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than transmitting power from North Dakota to New York City."
Yes, because we all know that every locale has magic electricity faeries just waiting to produce low-carbon-footprint electricity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All this talk about solar and wind energy being "free" and building these giant wind farms and turbines has had me wondering about something that I never see addressed. Has anyone considered the meteorological effects of removing all that energy from the atmosphere? I mean wind and solar energy serve a FUNCTION, they move our weather systems around, melt our snow, power our rivers, etc. You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No energy is truly "free," after all. But environmentalists keep talking about wind and solar as if there's NO downside whatsoever. It seems to me that there might be a pretty big one.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Made a quick template for you, could come handy for future posts. "What's needed instead is $buzzword1 and $buzzword2, the development of $buzzword 3 and the demonstration of technology such as $buzzword4, which could provide a cheaper way to reduce $buzzword5."
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
I spell carbon capture "c o a l s u b s i d y".
It's not going to work, it's just another way to subsidize coal companies, as if letting them blow the tops off of mountains wasn't enough.
Installing renewables local to where the power is needed is, of course, a great idea.
Absolute statements are never true
Decentralized generation seems likely to offer more jobs at the local level, both for construction of smaller, more numerous generating facilities and for on-going staffing and maintenance.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Every time someone suggests that we should continue burning carbon and just store the CO2, I can't help but think of Mars Attacks .
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The CBI in the UK has been railing against our governments focus on wind power as well.
They were also keen on carbon-capture and also nuclear.
It's funny how big corporate interests are not so keen on projects where any little group of people could afford their own small-scale generation capacity. Although I could be talking through my tinfoil hat.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Alfred_P._Sloan,_Jr.
Nuclear Power.
Just about anything but nuclear is a mistake.
Smart Grid technology is actually just around the corner. I was just listening to the CEO of Cisco talk about how they're trying to make a big push into this industry, a quick search turned up this; http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/energy/smart_grid_solutions.html
The slowing of the Earth's rotation is already the cause of those damnable leap seconds. You want more?
You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No. The wind is surface wind, so imagine how much wind is actually in the atmosphere. The wind pushing your clouds is a bit higher up. With sunlight, the energy is either heating your tiles, or charging them. It is a preference, not a robbery of some sort. And we find charge has more uses than hot tiles.
Free, though, it is not, and you are correct about there being a downside. It is in the form of cost, infrastructure, and energy efficiency, among others.
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
The problem with the large power grid is that power is generateed at a 60 Hz frequency. This corresponds to a 5000 km wavelength. A quarter wave line has a length of 1250 km (about 780 miles for the unit-challenged).
A quarter wavelength line has the property that a short circuit at one end appears as an open circuit at the other end and an open circuit appears at a short. This makes it very difficult to transmit 60 Hz power over a line of approximately that length, the line must be "impedance matched", by putting capacitors and/or inductors at several points along the line. Worse still, the line impedance varies with load, because when a higher current runs through the wires they heat up and, by dilation, lengthen and rest at a lower position, thereby increasing the capacitance to ground, which means those capacitors and inductors must be variable.
One solution is to use direct current, but that's as expensive or more than matching the impedance, although the grid becomes easier to stabilize when direct current is used.
All in all, any solution for making more electricity available is expensive. Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
We keep going after the same model over and over again. Search Finster's Law: A closed mouth gathers no feet. Big conglomerates produce and consumers buy. They get to set the rates and raise prices when they can come up with an excuse (weather, maintenance, etc) and commodities traders can bet on the spot prices. It's an old and broken model that benefits corporations while sapping money from consumers. With all the billions they keep mentioning wouldn't it be nice if someone had a clue and said: "if we give people a big enough incentive to use renewable sources at their business, home, government offices, etc we would not need more expensive transmission lines" Instead of wasting OUR tax dollars on supporting a broken model let's support a self sufficient model. We give tax incentives to homeowners, landlords, apartment owners, builders, etc to incorporate solar, wind, geothermal, etc into the actual buildings. Schools and local governments can get grants to become producers of energy (solar, wind, geothermal, etc) and sell excess to the business next door or the house down the street. With schools being closed during peek hours of daylight, there is a lot of potential. Government buildings can be retrofitted to be energy neutral or even produce excess (considering they work 9-5 there is a lot of potential to produce excess energy after hours in the southern sunny states) for the local community. In high demand hours a local message to clean energy buildings can ask them to reduce their own usage to increase output to the grid. The smart grid that is needed is updating local utilities to buy excess from anyone who provides clean energy. not what some utilities do, offset your own usage but anything extra they get for free. Germany started a solar revolution by allowing anyone that wanted to install solar to get a set price for 20 years. after the 20 year period imagine what their energy costs will be, from the highest in the region to possibly the lowest. Farmers are installing solar arrays and getting additional income, banks are financing the installations, over a million jobs created from the solar industry. Other countries are starting to see the long term potential of getting off this energy roller coaster. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/04/solar-incentives-could-ontario-be-the-next-germany It's OUR tax dollars they are using so let's put it to use in the right location, our local towns, schools, grocery stores, government buildings, libraries etc and not to support antiquated models fo they produce and we consume.
Capturing CO2 simply requires running smokestack emissions through a chilled ammonia bath at the cost of 25% input power... i.e. we get to pay for a 125% increase in the amount of coal burned.
How do we move all these gigatons of CO2 to disposal sites and store it forever?
Big, high pressure pipelines. Odd that nobody talking up a "clean" coal future ever talks about the comparative costs of a national pipeline network vs a smartgrid.
We have massive unused heavy manufacturing capability in terms of both idle car factories and a trained labor force that can be converted to building renewable generation capability. The question of replacing coal with wind/concentrated thermal solar is a question of political will, not technological capability.
Tech Public Policy stuff
He makes one interesting point: it would take a long time to build transmission lines that could carry large amounts of power all the way from the midwest to the northeast. In that time, technology could improve in a way that could make the project pointless.
On the other hand, improving the existing grid from 1940's tech to modern tech is guaranteed to be worth doing. (Is he correct that a major chunk of our existing grid is 1940's tech?)
On the subject of clean and decentralized power, how much longer before we get those solar roofing tiles that can contribute a useful amount of power? Even if we didn't wait for the improved tiles, would today's solar tiles provide a useful increment of electricity to feed into the current grid?
He quotes a price of $60 billion to build the new transmission lines. What would be the effect of using $60 billion to subsidize people to put solar tiles on top of existing buildings? How about $60 billion worth of pebble-bed or similarly safe small reactors, each one in a piece of the grid?
I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, but I'm inclined to agree that this project sounds like a way to put a whole bunch of eggs into a single basket. If we're going to do something big, let's try to make our electricity grid more decentralized, instead of adding one more frakking huge centralized source (however eco-clean).
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I think this is what you're looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
Toshiba isn't the only company working on this either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
Or, according to this NY Times article:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Arguments against DC power lines is based on ignorance.
Québec and Manitoba have big power lines and they save tons of money. The cost of the converters on both ends is offset by the lower cost of the power lines. DC power lines have less loss and only need 2 wires instead of three. You don't have the inductive losses in DC lines.
When the line exceeds 1000km the savings are huge.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nuclear is only a partial solution (currently) also. It is all mostly in your wiki article, but the high points IMHO:
1) shortage of Uranium mining (used at 2* the rate it is mined currently.)
2) shortage of manufacturing capacity (containment vessels)
3) many reactor technologies that can reduce #1 just haven't been proven to be viable yet(breeder reactors, fast reactors, etc)
I agree objections to any nuclear expansion are just wrong. But we can't just drop any options, because their is clearly no one solution to cover our energy addiction, let alone to get us through the next 20 years.
Both high voltage AC and high voltage DC lines would work in terms of reinforcing the network. This is not where the criticism presented in the article is aimed at. It's borrowing off an idea poorly expressed in Hot Flat and Stupid in a book by Thomas Friedman that there should be smart "green" electrons. This totally fails to address a key point about electricity and network security which is the point at which the network passes from 100.000% load to 100.001% load ... something you all experienced a few years ago when the US power system went DARK. An overloaded electricity system does clog up and gently reduce capacity like - say - you local water supply. IT JUST TURNS OFF and the cascade effect takes down the rest of the network.
The very real benefit of a strong network is that once you have it in place, then you can put your green energy into it. And parking photovoltaics on your house, calling the power green and ignoring the mining and energy costs associated with building them is not *really* green, just *feel good* green.
[/rant]
Different thing to the link and slightly bigger, but yes if you have a military budget and staff it actually does work. The disadvantages in efficiency and safety are due to using technology from when Carter was a boy (as well as the lack of economy of scale) but you can expect nothing else from Westinghouse. The 23 year life must just about be up on some of those.
I don't even know how to dignify this with a response, apart from encouraging the moderators to mod it down as a troll, rather than 'Insightful'
Assuming that our government spontaneously decided to turn fascist, do you really think that they'd need a "smart grid" to cut power to undesirable cities and factories? They could just as easily physically sever the connection!
The "smart grid" is about repairing our power system, while anticipating future demands and generation methods. The current system has suffered from decades of neglect (as has much of our infrastructure), and is dangerously vulnerable in places. Three summers ago, about 170,000 residents of Queens in New York City lost power for several weeks after half of the feeder cables serving the borough burned up, while most of the other half eventually failed as well due to the grid's inability to properly compensate for the reduced supply. To help manage demand, many large buildings participate in a program that allows the utility company to cut power to Air Conditioning units if demand is too heavy.
In 2003, the entire northeast US (45 million people) lost power, due to a single (minor) fault in Ohio.
There's no grand conspiracy. Our current infrastructure is old, and needs to be fixed.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
just wrong.
Objecting because nuclear power is dirty is wrong? Objecting because nuclear power is "Hooked On Subsidies" and is not profitable without those subsidies is wrong? Objecting because cost overruns quadruple the cost of building plants is just wrong?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?