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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."
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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
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.
There's an old story about the Communists in China digging a dam, and an observer asks why they're using shovels instead of excavators. "To create more jobs", they say. "Oh, I thought you were building a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons."
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I agree - mod parent up.
You know what we should do? We should go ahead and continue to extract carbon from the bowels of the earth, pulverize it and shoot it into the atmosphere. That just makes economic sense. But then - you're going to like this - we go chase down all the carbon in the sky, catch it, and put it under the rug.
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.
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
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.