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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.
There is a reason we environmentalists would not be pleased with this, still produces CO2. The CO2 will still lead to global warming and lead to acid rain; all while lining the pockets of BIG coal along with their big supporters in the Republican and Libertarian parties with gold. The only way to go is a 100% solution of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and tidal. All of those solutions will be a better benefit towards the environment as it is totally carbon neutral and does not leave any radioactive waste.
Only the willfully ignorant and those who will benefit such as the greedy energy producing executives along with their blind, Republican and Libertarian sheeple will be pleased about using any fossil fuel based technology for energy.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
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?
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.)
Damn it! Why should we use solar today when we can have cold fusion tomorrow?!
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."
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.
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.)
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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.
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.