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Mixing Coal and Solar To Produce Cheaper Energy
Al writes "It might not please many environmentalists, but a major energy company is adding solar-thermal power to a coal plant and says this could be the cost-effective way to produce energy while lowering CO2 emissions. Abengoa Solar and Xcel Energy, Colorado's largest electrical utility, have begun modifying the coal plant, which is based near Grand Junction, Colorado. Under the design, parabolic troughs will be used to preheat water that will be fed into the coal plant's boilers, where coal is burned to turn the water into steam. Cost savings comes from using existing turbines and generators and from operating at higher efficiencies, since the turbines and generators in solar-thermal plants are normally optimized to run at the lower temperatures generated by parabolic mirrors."
as that was my first thought too upon reading the headline =)
Your brain is not a computer.
sounds good to me, donno any environmentalists who would object to burning less coal...
Why would it not please them...if they are rational?
But maybe the answer is contained within the question....
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It turns out that you can turn CO2 into fuel by exposing it to a titanium oxide catalyst in the presence of sunlight. In a closed cycle, this would be a carbon-neutral way to go. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/23/carbon-dioxide-fuel.html
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Why wouldn't environmentalists be happy with this? I consider myself one and think this is great news. Too many people focus on 100% solutions. You don't need to eliminate 100% of coal in the short term. Reducing coal consumption by 80% or so by having solar provide heat during peak hours (daytime) would still be a huge benefit.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
It turns out that you can turn CO2 into fuel by exposing it to a titanium oxide catalyst in the presence of sunlight.
That's just another form of solar power, it's just you're using the sunlight to produce fuel rather than electricity. If it's more efficient than solar electrical generation (very possible) then it's a good idea, it's bound to be more efficient than biofuels, but whether it's more efficient than solar water heating, I don't know.
You'd probably need a concentrated source of CO2 for that, so it would either reduce efficiency, by using some energy to concentrate CO2, or would use existing power plants outputs, meaning it's not carbon neutral.
Everyone should read this http://www.withouthotair.com/
The solution is nuclear freaking power. Even China realizes this now.
We've been in the Atomic age for 60 years now and still don't have a majority of our energy from nuclear energy. It's such a disgrace.
going to have to mine to get that titanium
A small group of us have been pushing this concept for the last 4 years on Ritter( and before him, Owens; what a waste that was). The idea is simply that a retro-fit on an existing coal plant will get us to lower the costs of solar thermal collectors. Once these are going up in place on older plants, it will be much easier to convert these plants to Natural gas as well. The idea is that we take advantage of a lot of equipment that is not shot.
The one issue with this site is that it will be shut down in about a year or so. At that time, the collectors will have to be moved to another plant. The nice advantage of this, is that new approaches will be thought through on how to hook in the AE.
The other part that is not being mentioned is that this can also be used with geo-thermal. The west has LOADS of somewhat easily accessed heat in the ground. Combine this with potter drilling and we are looking at a nice way to quickly convert old coal plants into Solar and geo-thermal. Keep in mind that many of the coal plants in America have been around since the 50's through the 70's, are about 100 MW, typically located CLOSE to communities, AND have lots of land around them (they were dirty). OTH, the new GW coal plants go in a LONG WAYS AWAY from cities. There is a much larger transmission lose in the lines. By using the older plants, we take advantage of closeness and not needing to provide GW of power.
This idea seems so obvious one is left to wonder why it hasn't been in use since the 1973 energy crisis?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Environmentalists are anti-human. They would rather see everyone die than have a single blade of grass wither.
Read more about the evils of environmentalism here.
Interesting. I'd soulike to know how efficient this is in storing solar energy (any less than the 10-15% now possible via solar cells. Also, what are the production costs and can it be scaled up, or is this destined to remain in the lab?
Ultimately, nature has a million-year R&D advantage over us - plants are the only true carbon-neutral solar fuel collectors really over a full product life cycle.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
going to have to mine to get that titanium
But, being a catalyst in this reaction, it should be re-usable.
The important questions are how this type of generator compares with photovoltaics in terms of the energy it takes to manufacture, the environmental impact of its manufacture, operational lifetime, and energy output per unit of area.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Sometimes insisting on that last 20% means sacrificing the other 80%.
We can get the 20% later. In time these plants will be phased out, and by then, we should have a better long-distance transmission grid and cheaper power storage. And, in fact, that 80%-ish reduction in coal that this tech could bring about is actually a bigger difference than it may seem, because by reducing coal demand, we'll begin phasing out subbitumenous coal and lignite (the dirtier kinds). In 15-20 years, I hope to see fossil fuels mainly taking up a "reserve" power role, making up for shortfalls in renewables, rather than being a primary generation mechanism in their own right.
And, FYI, IMHO, hydroelectric power is anything but green (moreso in some places than others, mind you). It's utterly devastated the Colorado River ecosystem. Tidal can also be really problematic. I am a fan of solar, wind, and geo, though.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
So? there is not power process that doesn't involve mining at some point.
Converting CO2 to methane and using it as a power source is frigging cool.
I hope this ramps up. We could actually take CO2 out of the atmosphere to return us to pre-industrial age levels.
If we can do that, then burn all the coal you want.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But if one were to siphon off the CO2 output from the Coaler plant described, could you further increase efficiency of the boiler by running the exhaust through the solar/TiO2 system and feeding it back into the boiler?
:(
Car Analogy... car analogy... like a Turbo charger*?
*I don't know how a turbo charger works
Why couldn't a small array be put on the roof of a landlocked coal plant? Granted, the smokestack would cause relatively small shadows in parts of the array as the sun moves across the sky, but as long as the array is large enough to work with (say) 10% failure, then wouldn't a small array still be useful?
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
This does not make any sense to me. A coal plant has scads of waste heat at high enough temperatures to preheat any amount of water. Exactly where does solar heat fit into this picture? It seems like an expensive way to heat water and as a consequence, let more hot coal gas get away.
Step 1 in saving the environment in the short run should probably be spending money on reducing pollution where it also brings reasonable savings, as the effect on nature is cumulative on the world.
And less coal used means less need to dig it out, which means less coal miners in the long run. "In [USA] 2006, 72 miners lost their lives at work, 47 in coal mining", "an average of 21,351 injuries per year between 1991 and 1999". Which means this actually saves lives, not to count expenses of compensations to those hurt or families of killed.
Don't forget nuclear. Be a fan of nuclear power if you want to be green. We need to start building new feeder/breeder reactors. They can use the waste of the previous generation of plants as fuel with a much reduced waste footprint. Combine that with the small area and resistance to adverse climate and it makes a good compliment for other "green" energy.
Wind IMO is not that great for large scale deployment, to unreliable. Though it would be quite acceptable over time for tasks that don't require constant power, such as water purification or hydrogen electrolysis.
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment. Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is. Any coal still burned is still polluting the Greenhouse, creating huge and unmanageable costs just a little down the road (and downwind, the typical "coal is clean" illusion).
They should just convert the entire plant to solar. But coal is too subsidized for them to abandon it, and its lobbyists have too tight a chokehold on the government for solar to have an equal shot at economic efficiency.
--
make install -not war
There have been many attempts of late to greenwash coal, this solar project and the "clean coal" concepts being the most recent incarnation. Even if 100% of coal plants can be made 100% carbon neutral, where do they get the coal from?
in December 2008, a 40 acre ash pond in tennessee broke through its walls and flooded millions of gallons of coal ash, potentially far worse than the Exxon Valdez. This is one of the largest environmental disasters that has happened in the US, and there has been little to no national coverage about this accident.
There are a lot of heavy hitters in the coal industry that want to put the best possible face on coal (e.g. Montana), and it is alarming that 'mountaintop removal', the laziest way to get coal, is frequently not discussed when considering how green a coal plant can be.
There is good article on howstuffworks.com on turbo chargers. The basic principle is to take the exhaust run it through a fan which is then used to push more air into the motor for more power.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/turbo.htm
Kids, you can't pre$VERB. Pre- is for events. But let's pretend that you can. Preheat would mean before heat... what the summary describes is HEATING the water. When you put water in a pot and place that pot on a stove, and turn on the element to boil the water... you are heating the water. There's no need to add pre-. When you walked to the store yesterday, you didn't postwalk to the store... you walked. If you plan to walk to the store, you are not going to prewalk... you're just gonna walk.
Would you say "I'm going to pre-open this door so I can walk through it"? No, you'd leave off the pre-. Even if you open the door five years before you plan to go through it, you'd just be opening. Nothing magical about it. Adding pre- contributes nothing. It's just ignorance and pretension. Commonly used/accepted != right.
Don't add pre- to things just to make it sound more technical.
Pre- is for delineating what happened before the event. Every day before 9/11 would be pre-9/11. The steps you take before you heat the oven would be preheating. Once you turn on the oven, it is heating. You are now in the era of the oven heating.
|*turn on oven*|*oven is hot*
Preheating would be everything to the left of *turn on the oven*.
So instead of "preheat the oven to treefitty". It should be "set the oven to treefitty. While the oven is heating, do steps B, C and D".
Hit reply to post some lame excuse about "language's change over time get use 2 it at, LoL". i won't read it. Use your karma to "bury" my comment if it makes you feel better about being ignorant. i'm OK with that. OR - Learn what words actually mean and how they should be used (and not).
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Wind isn't going to work on a wide basis, too many problems and all the solutions are stop gap.
Geo won't work in many places.
Industrial Solar Thermal, and IFR plants are the greenest options we have.
However, if this scales up:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/03/23/carbon-dioxide-fuel-02.html
we might be able to burn coal without CO2 issues.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
More important, an inexpensive 80% solution will have a far greater impact than a more expensive 100% solution, for the same money invested. If it costs the same to coal plants in the country with solar-thermal tech as it does to replace half the coal plants with pure solar-thermal or photovoltaic, then you're better off with the 80% solution. The hybrid approach eliminates 80% of solar usage whereas the 100% solution only eliminates 50%. But any practical person can see this.
The problem with environmentalism is that it has traditionally been a bastion of idealists, and idealists are not necessarily very practical people. However, this is changing.
When I make a cup of tea in the microwave, I can put in a cup of cold water and set the timer for 3 minutes, or I can fill from the "hot" tap, put in a cup of warm water, and set the timer for 2 minutes. Using solar to preheat the water means less coal burned for unit power. Even if you weren't trying to reduce your "carbon footprint", this is still an excellent thing to do.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You know...plants do it, why can't we? I love it.
What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" do you not understand?
As a person that lives in a region powered mostly by coal, this whole lets tax the fuck outta coal cap & trade bandwagon annoys the shit out of me. I'm sure it doesn't concern all you hippies living out on the East and West coasts with your fancy solar, wind and wave power, your energy will be relatively cheap in the foreseeable future. Oh well, screw everyone else for our agenda! Right?
Explain exactly how places like Southern Indiana for example, are going to be able to completely replace coal fired plants with wind, or solar power. I don't see it being viable, EVER, especially not with current technology. Throw the extra demand on the grid due to everyone plugging their electric cars (that btw, are woefully inefficient in northern climates, especially if you like premium features like... heat and defrost) in, and it becomes even more unrealistic!
I'm all for nuclear power (which AC treehugger above doesn't even acknowledge as a "green" source of power), but even with that; assuming you can get a nuclear plant approved and built in a reasonable amount of time (which you can't with current retarded legislation), where the hell is the funding going to come from for that? The economy is shit right now, all we need is more taxes and higher energy costs, which raise the cost of pretty much everything else produced. Guess where most of your corn comes from?
grep -iw skynet
or at least link to the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the fact that it was water and not ice proves the water was, in fact, pre-heated. Now you are adding MORE energy to get it even warmer, but it had been heated before it got to the stove.
If the was open for you when you expected to opem it your self, it's preopened. I.E> opened before you expected it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perhaps Indiana and the other midwest states could declare the law "nullified" due to unconstitutionality. Just because Congress passes a requirement that Midwest plants tax carbon does not mean the states have to enforce it - I can not lay my hand on any part of the Supreme Law which gives Congress that power.
On the contrary it seems quite clear that the power is reserved to the states exclusively.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Running some water through reflected sunlight before said water is heated by burning coal isn't solar energy, either.
This whole it may not make environmentalist happy thing is BS.
Sure, environmentalists will have a healthy debate about how to educate people and make sure 'coalar' if you will is actually a cost effective way to drop CO2 emissions fast (it may or may not be)....
Coal does need to go away. It is that simple. We can't instantly stop burning coal, however. We need to phase it out.
Solar Thermal boosting a coal plant sounds reasonable if there is actually enough power collected to drop the amount of coal burned.
CO2 capture and solar production of Algal fuel from coal plants is also a good idea.
(Algal fuel production requires concentrated CO2 sources)
CO2 is a problem people and we need to focus.
Nuclear, Hydro, Solar, wind, CO2 capture + solar reformation. Replacing coal with natural gas. Its all part of the puzzle.
What makes people angry is people characterizing environmentalists as uninformed because other people put words in there collective mouths or people who claim the earth isn't warming or coal can be clean enough (ie: as clean as say natural gas) .. it won't be and that is not clean enough.
We need a mix of short and long term thinking.
All in all, GW is dire and the options are complex.
I've always liked tidal power, as a concept. It's as reliable as clockwork, almost limitlessly abundant, and truly renewable.
And currently prohibitively expensive and unfeasible. Still, it's something to work at.
My agenda is having air to breathe. Fuck you and your coal. Southern Indiana can buy it electricity from other places, just like we had to buy coal from you in the past.
The Clean Air Act mandates lots of things vis-a-vis pollution, and it did stand up in court. Interstate commerce clause-> CO2 travels across state lines, has effects on state economies (global warming->fires & hurricanes). At least that's one way you could justify it.
When the water cools I imagine it's a lot of water, so would it be practical to have the steamed water hit a ceiling after it turns a turbine and then run down back onto another, maybe smaller, turbine? Is this already done?
Can I bum a sig?
There are also Indian and Chinese attempts to utilise Thorium as nuclear fuel, which is much harder to weaponise, relatively abundant on the earth's crust, and can be recycled repeatedly resulting in less nuclear waste.
Google Talks: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
There's no single energy resource that is going to meet the needs of the power grid. Coal and nuclear are too slow to follow load, wind and solar are intermittent, hydro, geothermal and biomass are limited locationally. Natural gas is subject to price volatility.
The grid's energy requirements are too big and complicated to be handled by any one source of energy. Using baseload resources to provide the bulk of the energy with intermittent resources to provide cheaper or more timely energy with hydro and natural gas to fill in the gaps is what it is necessary now.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
I was the post above that said I have been trying for nearly 4 years to get Colorado to do this approach. Lets talk economics of this. Many cities have 1-4 SMALL coal plants (typically about 100 MW) that are located in there. Because they were built in the 50-70, they are much older and not as efficient. Many companies want to get rid of them and bring in GW size plants. These monster would be located on the outer fringe and would then have to transport lots of electricity for a long haul. That is wasteful, but it turns out not terribly expensive. With that approach, easterners can get electricity at about .07-.15/kw.. Now, would can AE do? Well, Solar thermal only works when the sun shines. When it does, the price of electricity is about .09-.14/KW. The problem is that solar thermal requires energy storage to go all night. Also you would have to build out a much larger field of collectors (the original group was collecting for the daytime). If you do storage, then the price is jacked up to .16-.25/kwh. Simply put, you can not compete with the .07-15 price. BUT, if we take CURRENT COAL plants, and add these collectors to them, there will be no need for storage. More importantly, it will lower the use of coal. Basically, you can think of the collectors doing the real work during the day time. During the day time, the collectors have the potential to replace 60-80% of coal. That is HUGE. So, why should this be used? Because we need to get manufacturing going. As you increase manufacturing, the price goes down. Today, the price of the collectors is .09-.14kw. If we push strongly on this, the price of the collectors will drop within 5-10 years so that they are below .03KW (for the west; the east will still be higher priced). That will lead to all fo the small coal plants being converted to holding storage as well.
This is the intelligent start of converting our economy to AE. Solar PV has to be one of the most foolish ideas going. In addition, Wind is cheap, but it can not work 24x7. The solar Thermal can replace coal/natural gas and with cheap cheap storage, it can replace the coal plants. The only other intelligent choice is geo-thermal power. That is coming with potter drilling success
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This will speed up the shutdown of coal plants. Basically, it will lower the costs of Solar Thermal by increased manufactuering and it will be replacing coal plants over the next decade. For the next 5 years, the focus will be to add the solar thermal to increase the efficiency of the plants and lower the amount of coal used. BUT, it will also lower the costs of Solar Thermal. When the collectors get cheap enough, then plants will add these to collect for nighttime storage. Within a decade, we will see our first conversion of an existing coal plant to solar thermal with natural gas as a pure back-up (natural gas is easy to burn and supply) and it will be WITHOUT the subsidies that ANY OF THE PLANTS GET TODAY (and yes, ALL FORMS OF ELECTRICTY AND ENERGY IN AMERICA GET SUBSIDIES).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, I don't suppose you can really mine for trees... there's a couple power generating processes in there (e.g., burning them, making into windmills, etc.)
You still have to mine for fuel.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Damn it! Why should we use solar today when we can have cold fusion tomorrow?!
Sure you do. Of course we only have a few centuries of uranium already mined.
If it displeases environmentalists, it will be because it's still really bad for the environment.
No sources.
Using solar to preheat the water instead of more coal to preheat it just admits that solar is a more effective tech for generating energy than coal is.
Nonsense, and if parent had read the article he would have read
"The net effect is that less coal is used to generate a given amount of electricity, and the augmented system reduces carbon dioxide emissions as much as a stand-alone solar-thermal plant with the same size array, but at a much lower cost"
and
"The turbines and generators in solar-thermal plants are optimized to run at the temperatures generated by parabolic mirrors (at least in current designs), which are lower than those generated in fossil fuel-powered plants--about 400C versus 500C or higher. Using the higher-temperature turbines in coal plants results in higher efficiency--about 45 percent of the energy in the heat generated by the coal and solar concentrators combined is converted into electricity, as opposed to only 38 percent of the heat with a typical solar-thermal plant."
You mine for a year, it lasts you decades. You mine coal for a year, you have to repeat it year after year. Having to mine the fuel is the weakest argument against nuclear. You'll still have to drill for oil or mine coal.
What do you do with all the methane then? Methane is more damageable than co2. Yoo can burn Methane but then you get back co2.
A few centuries at current usage rates? Or at a rate sufficient to replace current and future fossil fuels?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Great - now we have to go that extra step and replace *100%* of the coal burned in a given plant with small, right sized nuclear reactors like:
not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.
That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.
This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.
We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).
The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:
http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller
which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".
Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.
Ed
A "pleased environmentalist" is an oxymoron, so don't sell yourself short.
Why do we have to be conventional about electric cars? We treat batteries like a fuel tank and electricity as gas and fantasize about hydrogen gas replacements. Why not think more like propane tanks? You get a large battery pack, use it up and then swap for another one when it goes dead. They can contain some electronics per battery pack. You pay when you swap it. Proper standardization and you'd be able to do seamless tech upgrades on the batteries (which is why you want some electronics on the batteries.) Sure, you could also charge it slowly yourself if you wanted (making use of solar car parks etc.)
Its not like I'm giving up much; I can't make my own gas either.
Battery cost would be amortized, greatly lowering car costs! You'd pay it in "battery fuel" which would cost more initially but likely it would be competitive, since the car cost would drop by the battery price making them cheaper than gas cars. The per-mile cost would depend on life of the battery, how many batteries your car uses, and the low low price of electricity. Electric costs are in the pennies per mile so if they rose to include batteries to $4-5 per mile-- so be it! It would tend to go down over time instead of upward like gas.... level off at cheaper than gas prices after maybe 5 years? in 50 years it might be down to pennies a gallon (Mr. Fusion?)
My car has a 300 mile range; I'm ok with stopping 3 times more to swap my tank-- although 99% of the time I travel less than 100 miles in a day and could charge it overnight. So I'd actually stop for "fuel" much less than I do now... more likely I'd do it because the battery was wearing out. Sure, this makes for a tough business model on the batteries since many people would not pay for swaps and refills making that battery an operating loss. One could have the battery record usage and you'd be billed later; complex charging could also deter physical hacking... it would still happen but not for most people. (as is the case with music etc now-- they are still highly profitable.)
Standardized battery packs makes for easy transitions of technology and lowers costs for the batteries; its pretty bad to have to go to the dealer to get expensive replacement parts (VW I'm looking at you...) We are shafted today with some parts; however, its not that frequent or expensive like battery packs...
There is no reason the battery packs have to be 100s of pounds and massive... something that can work for a tiny car would be a good size. Other cars would require 2-4 of them. The rates they pay wouldn't have to be a multiple of how many they use (but it probably should be.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Doesn't work that way. Power plants are very rarely phased out. The ability to nickel-and-dime old power plants on maintenance and newer regulations has kept the vast majority alive far longer than they reasonably should have been...
Oil refineries are a better example, because the situation is completely unambiguous. There simply hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the US in DECADES, despite numerous failures due to age, safety and environmental issues, immense profit for oil companies, and an endless cycle of refining capacity shortages in the US driving prices ever higher.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
These traditional coal plants...seems to me they could be repurposed to burn dried wood, which is carbon neutral at least. You look at out west, every season, it never skips, we get all these news reports of one buhzillion acres going up in smoke, a total waste. No matter *what* we do, it seems this stuff is gonna burn up anyway, so we might as well create-back a lot of logging jobs and make use of it and improve the forests by managing them better. We don't have to scrap the coal burning infrastructure then, at least not right away, and can turn a liability-drought ravaged forests and now all those pines being killed by the pine beetle-into an energy production asset. Some of them anyway, I am also in favor of some really large biochar facilities, and again, perhaps some coal plants could be re-engineered into production of biochar along with the electricity. So we'd have solar thermal, perhaps a windfarm in the same area to take advantage of the transmission lines, the coal, the wood scraps, and biochar, all at the same complex, with the goal of eventually phasing out the coal. Maybe, just a thought..
I like this. Reminds me of the Kite-ship story, back when the price of oil was heading moon-wards.
As I see it, the point is, you get additional energy with no additional CO2 burden.
Absolutely not. Wind is already almost cost-competitive with coal (there are a few places where it's cheaper than coal already even without the feed-in). 30 years ago, wind was about 90 cents per kilowatt hour. The tech keeps improving; heck, a good chunk of recent costs were simply due to a turbine and tower production shortfall. Now, wind can't make up more than about 30% of the grid without either generator backup or long-term storage (such as large hydro reservoirs, pumped or standard). But that'd still be 30% of the grid.
EGS works all over the country. Do a google image search for the following: geothermal potential
However, if this scales up:
I'd bet on ten to one odds that won't be more cost-effective than just straight solar-thermal.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
Nonsense; power plants get phased out all the time. New Source Review has helped ensure that (random example), but even before it, it still happened all the time. Old plants get progressively more expensive to operate. Once all of the plant's steel is practically corroded through, it's cheaper just to scrap the plant and build a new one.
There simply hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the US in DECADES, despite numerous failures due to age, safety and environmental issues, immense profit for oil companies, and an endless cycle of refining capacity shortages in the US driving prices ever higher.
You're barking up the wrong tree. My father is the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners. They're nearly done with expanding one of their refineries to be the largest in the US. The main reason there haven't been new refineries is that it's cheaper just to expand their existing ones. A refinery is very unlike a power plant. There's a huge number of different units all feeding to each other. Individual units get shuttered all the time, they're scrapped for metal/parts, and the space gets reused.
Get out, or I'll have vice-president Agnew's headless body throw you out!"
They want to keep their coal and nuclear plants, because they are big business. Solar panels, solar cells, wind power and fermentation plants are smaller and can be bought and used by small groups of interested people or even individuals. That scares the hell out of them. It is a little bit like Mainframes and PCs. Before the invention of home computers, only a few could have such machines, and use their power. Today a vast set computers exist. Many people possess one or two of them. These little machines made it possible to implement the Internet as a global information and communication machine.
The use of small * plants will change the usage of the electric grid and the management of consumer loads. And this transformation convert electric companies from sellers of energy into carrier companies similar to telecommunication companies today. They provide the service of transporting electricity to your home and from your home.
BTW: They are working on cold storage buildings (and refrigerators) which use primarily energy when it is cheap (e.g. the wind blows strong). So when electricity is cheap they cool their stuff a little lower then necessary and when it becomes more expensive (e.g. no wind blows) they wait until the temperature climbed to an upper barrier before they start cooling again even if the prices are higher. Such "intelligent" installations will also change the way electricity is used and base load providers like coal and nuclear plants will become obsolete.