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Tokelau Becomes First Country To Go 100% Solar
First time accepted submitter zonky writes "Tokelau has become the first country in the world to go 100% solar power generation, moving away from their entirely diesel power supply, which formerly supplied the energy needs of the 1400 residents of their small south pacific Island Nation. From the article: 'All three atolls in the South Pacific dependency, a New Zealand territory, will have their own solar power system by the end of October, despite a slight delay switching on the first system.'"
It is amazing that the USA is NOT investing more into getting Hawaii moved onto AE for energy and tesla is not pushing their car there.
The reason why is because right now, nearly ALL of Hawaii's energy is from oil.
Tesla could jump the production line to an easy 30K or even 40K for the model S and would still sell 100% of those cars on Hawaii.
Oddly, Hawaii is setting up free electrical charging posts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There's this recent invention called battery... you might have heard of it.
Sleep and mate I'm guessing.
that they are a pacific island with a population of 1400.
Not that far from saying something like Sealand is the first nation to adopt bitcoin as a national currency, which I am sure they would if they thought they could profit off it.
Great Intellect...
Sadly Tokelau will be the first nation to go under the waves when the waters rise. I've met a few Tokelauans and they are uniformly terrific people. Their culture will pretty much vanish when migrate to New Zealand.and their kids become Kiwis (New Zelanders - the fruit is named after the people who are named after the bird).
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Only in the loosest sense of the work is this a country !
Even "Island Nation" is a bit of stretch
Falls in the same category as Guam and American Somoa so it understandable - but it also falls in the same category as Falkland Islands which is a better comparison when pondering if this a country, nation or just an dependant island territory.
Well PV actually is quite cost effective against the carbon alternatives in this case. Not only is the country small making this project quite easy, but it's in the middle of nowhere so shipping costs for carbon based energy sources were equal to the cost of energy itself. One article mentioned that they were spending $800000 on shipping $1m worth of diesel every year.
I can see how solar PV could pay for itself quite quickly in this case.
Which is more preferable than browsing bad porn on cheap .tk domains.
-- no sig today
Hang on a second!
Why are they doing something that wont pay off for the long term, when in the long term they're gonna be innundated or sink. Either way, AGW will claim the land?
Except Tokelau is not a country.
Oops.
Great fact checking, editors.
A whole 1400 people?
On a tropical island with way more sunshine than many more temperate areas?
See: Log, falling off of.
Seriously, I understand that it's a first. It's a step forward for possibly more similar places to switch. But let's be real here, supplying just 1400 people on a tropical island isn't exactly breaking any major technical barriers or pushing the envelope of scalability.
The tech to accomplish what they did has been around for at least a couple of decades, and likely became affordable/economical at least ten years ago or more at that small a scale and under those near-perfect conditions for a solar power installation. They'll still need some emergency diesel generators however for the inevitable hurricane/typhoon damage/outages.
Again, I think it's an admirable accomplishment and I salute them for it. It's a decision that makes sense all around for them and their limited needs, considering their abundance of sunshine resulting from location, and it's a "first" that will go into the history books.
Tropical flowers of all kinds smell better without the odor of diesel floating on the gentle tropical breeze. ;-)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
From the article:
Tokelau has a population of about 1400 and they have access to electricity for between 15-18 hours a day.
Somehow I don't think the average American will to agree to not having 24 hour a day access to electricity.
AC won over DC because it simplified long distance transmission using step-up and step-down transformers. A strictly local solar power plant does not need the expense and complexity of DC to AC inverters. A much cheaper, reliable, and efficient system could be designed as totaly DC.
Somehow I don't think the average American will to agree to not having 24 hour a day access to electricity.
The average American isn't awake 24 hours a day, so how would they know ... well until they open the fridge the next morning and find that all the food is warm.
Solar panels on deserts are still a mirage in this modern age
It's a territory of NZ.
And it's apparently not at all on solar yet, the first system turns on in two weeks, the last in October.
I'm not even going to grouse about the 3 cars that run on fossil fuel, because that's peanuts next to the fact that the country won't even have power 24 hours a day (article says 12-18h).
This article is just plain wrong.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
First, does Tokelau actually produce enough of anything to /pay/ for the solar infrastructure? I didn't think so.
Second, IT'S NOT A COUNTRY! FIVE SECONDS TO CHECK THAT ON WIKIPEDIA SAMZENPUS.
Way to go /. for hiring him. The only way to do worse is not firing him for this.
What about Hawaii's "old" NELHA 220 kW Ocean Thermal Energy conversion plant off the Kona coast ?
OTEC solutions are apparently still alive in Hawaii, as a project and funding for building another more powerful OTEC plant off Maui's coast was awarded in 2010 to Lockheed Martin, and NELHA is aiming to build a second plant by 2014.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
OK, so right now they're going through about a barrel of Diesel every day for the whole island. That's really not too bad.
Now, just the batteries in the new system, keeping in mind that there's 1344 of them, and I'm being really generous here, let's assume that they each last 10 years. In other words, every 10 years the entire battery array needs to be replaced. That's a pretty impressive lifetime for SLA batteries, and even more so for wet cells, which are quite a bit cheaper and can be massive, but it's reasonable to assume that they're using mainstream technology, and that means SLA cells.
So, spread out evenly, that's one battery every 3 days (give or take a few hours) over 10 years. Of course, in the real world, you'll replace one prematurely failing cell every month or so, and then do an evaluation every year or so, maybe swap out half a dozen cells. Most of the cells will do just fine for their entire lifetime, but when that is up (again, assuming 10 years), you need to replace the cell regardless. After all, even slight differences in voltage in an array like that can cause a cell to murder it's neighbors, and you don't want that.
So, what's worse? 3 barrels of Diesel, or a 60-pound or so chunk of lead and plastic?
It's probably a wash, cost-wise, although they will be getting 24H power, which is always nice, and no noise. However, keep in mind that Diesel generators are 100+ year old technology, and as such things go, are pretty bulletproof and low maintenance. Solar gear will take more of a beating, PV cells will also get damaged, fail, and wear out, and they're not cheap.
I'm sure that they've sat down and done the math and decided that it's a good net investment, but it's definitely not ZOMG FREE ENERGY !!!!1!!ONE!
The news isn't that it's a country - which it's not - but that an entire island, cut off from mainland grid, is able to use solar power as its only means of generating electric power. This makes it very interesting, and I would like to know a lot more about what their grid looks like, how they handle peaks and lows in solar output (like day and night), and so on.
They will get a new flag for the night, that one will feature a sun :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Tokelau
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
I think last year I had to hose off some bird poop once. And nobody I know has had an inverter fail. I would just mod you down, but I'd like to call attention to the fact that solidraven is full of bird poop.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They spent about $2,000,000 a year on fuel. They won't anymore.
Learn to love Alaska
Early in the article they claim to be replacing the generators, but further down they say: "The solar power systems will be capable of providing 150 per cent of the annual electricity demand without increasing diesel demand." That tells me they intend to still use the generators and the solar will augment them to reduce fossil fuel usage. Meh. Sounds to me like the article is just marketing hype. Nothing extraordinary happening.
If a high-rise apartment building went 100% solar and completely independent from the electric grid that would be news worthy.
I think the most significant aspect of this is the fact that it frees Tokelau of a dependence on an external resource.
There is no airport or airstrip in Tokelau, nor are there any docks. 2 or 3 boats a month visit the islands, usually departing from Apia in Samoa. Upon arrival in the islands, passengers and cargo are offloaded on to smaller vessels before being taken ashore. As the article mentions tropical storms are a real concern in this part of the Pacific (not to mention tsunami) and shipping can be disrupted because of these natural disasters and for other reasons (mechanical failure, search and rescue obligations, medical evacuations). The difficulty, expense and reliability of supply are no longer matters that need to be considered.
What I don't understand (and this could be due to my complete ignorance regarding the workings of diesel engines) is why they still need to ship in fuel for the cars. The tropical islands of the Pacific do not want for coconut trees and the extraction of coconut oil is a straightforward process with not too much capital investment required. Surely it should be possible to use it as a replacement for diesel or at least convert it into biodiesel, unless of course the cars have petrol engines.
The preceding line was intentionally left blank.
Yeah, they have batteries and still only get electricity 15-18 hours a day, and then probably only for something small like a light bulb or a tiny TV. It's not really applicable to industrial countries, much less in the non-tropical areas with poor insolation.
The simulations showed for example, that in order to provide 100% regenerative energy in Germany, approximately 80TWh of storage capacity is required. That's 1MWh per person. A Redox-Vanadium battery of this capacity is big as a ship container, good for 3000-5000 reload cycles and costs around 2 million dollars. It stores amount of electricity that costs 40-50 euros on the el. market.
What does that have to do with being a country of not?
Curiously, I am a New Zealander and this island is New Zealand territory with the New Zealand mainland funding the entire project and being constructed by New Zealand companies.
So, as a matter of fact, it is MY country ...
BTW - nice troll on the anti-USA war/oil thing ... a nice old standard ... i rate 3/10 for effort
Might want to check your facts. Solar and wind are very popular in third world countries for a major reason, they can be localized so they don't need infrastructure. It'd cost more to run power lines to rural communities than the solar cells cost. They are on tiny islands, self reliance are grass huts everything else has to be brought in so it's a ridiculous point. The difference is when solar cells get brought in they produce power for 25 to 30+ years. Diesel is an ongoing problem. Also this BS argument I constantly see without facts to back it up that some how solar cells release so much CO2 in their manufacture that they can't possibly offset the CO2 over their lives. Making a car releases massive amounts of CO2 as does a concrete building. I seriously doubt a bank of solar cells would contribute more than making a car and all the fuel it'll burn throughout it's life or say all the coal it takes to power your house for 25 to 30 years. I doubt they did it because it was expensive and impractical. I assume they weighed the options and it made sense. FYI Pacific islands aren't like Seattle Washington. The don't tend to have cloud cover for days at a time.
Vanadium redox cells are typically cited as over 10000 cycles. I don't know what simulations you refer to, but given that the average US household uses 6000kWh/year, that's an average of 0.7kW, and assuming an average of 3 people per household would mean that 1MWh per person (3 MWh per household) would be enough to run it for 180 days. Which sounds utterly absurd, especially once you start building more regional interconnects (heck, they're already talking about adding even *Iceland* to the European grid). Lastly, simulating a "100% scenario" is pointless. What's so wrong with a 90% or a 95% scenario (aka, using existing fossil plants if there's some low-probability shortfall event) if it makes the problem much easier to handle? Lastly, existing hydro plants in most regions can be uprated and used as battery buffers, holding months worth of power in their reservoir behind them. Pumped hydro's added cost per kWh sold is usually cited in the $0.01-$0.02/kWh range. It's cheap enough that it's starting to be used extensively in some places (such as China), not to support renewables, but simply to avoid having to build new power plants to meet daytime demand.
It should be noted that even PbA cells are a viable option in some locations (I believe there's a huge bank up in Alaska). It all depends on the scenario.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
I'm always shocked at the venom aimed at solar and wind power on Slashdot. I can't think something much geekier or high tech than solar cells. I constantly see posts about how wildly impractical they are and how they create more CO2 than coal power with no facts to back any of it up. The fact is, and yes I have run the numbers, without government subsidies the payback is no more than 5 to 7 years and depending on location and power needs it can be less. With subsidies depending on the area it's usually 3 to 5 years for payback. Considering bank interest is at best a couple of percent it's a staggering return on your investment considering they'll likely power your house for 30 years, 25 to 35 depending on how much excess capacity you initially install. They will continue to produce usable power for another 15 to 25 years. I've never seen evidence suggesting that enough solar cells to power your house releases more CO2 to make than 30 years of coal based electricity. If there's actual data I'd love to see it! As to wind power contributing as much as coal fire I can firmly call bullshit on that one since I can assemble a windmill out of scrap parts and an alternator out of a junk car. The technology isn't that different than a portion of what runs your car so there's simply no way a wind mill large enough to power a home takes more CO2 to produce than a car. Also once it's set up it contributes no CO2. Localized solar cells require no infrastructure saving a massive amount of resources needed to support power line and substations. Also substations use large amounts of PCBs, a very bad thing to have laying around. The argument always descends into a "nuclear good" "solar bad". Ignoring all the problems we've had with nuclear and I'm not talking about just Russia and Japan, we have our own places like Hanford. Even under the most ideal situation with flawless performance nuclear needs a massive distribution network. Also as much of the east coast found out this summer when it goes down vast areas are screwed. Guess what happens when your neighbors solar cells stop working? You still have AC like the rest of the neighborhood with solar cells. No one is suggesting we dump all other forms of energy and focus on solar although I've heard people try to claim we should drop everything in favor of nuclear. The flaw in that plan being without a massive infrastructure of breeders and reprocessing plants that don't exist we run out of fuel for the reactors in something like 40 years if we switched over entirely. Let's drop the my teams better than your team approach to solving the energy crisis and use what works best in each situation. Lets give them credit for what they are doing switching to a sustainable solution that works for them. I noticed multiple well modded posts saying what they did doesn't count. Personally I think it counts for a lot. They are leading by example and the least we can do is not whine about it!
Why not more wind power with the solar...
An island seems like a good place for wind turbines. Don't care for the noise/look of them? Use the horizontal ones. those you can hide almost anywhere and work pretty quiet too.
Why not tidal power too. surrounded by ocean seems like a good place for that....
Either way its nice to see someone finally wise up and change their energy systems for the better. Even if its some island in the middle of nowhere.
It's a start. And that really is more than the rest of the world has managed to do .
Hail, hail Tokelau, a land I didn't make up!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
A huge amount of electricity is not used directly by a house. Things like water and waste utilities etc bump it up pretty fast. Then there is industrial electricity use. The claim that such and such a solar panel/battery whatever "will power 10000 households" is pretty useless when we are talking about real usage and demand patterns.
However 1MWh does seem well over the top. Even if we all needed a few tons of Aluminum from the local smelter a year.
Pumped hydro is rather expensive (billions for something that gives you only a few GW for a few hours!) and is only good in a few areas. It does not even get close to solving the energy storage problem. Cost per kWh is not informative since you still have to pay to generate it in the first place.
Even with all of this the biggest problem with batteries other than cost, is lifetime and reliability. Billions for pumped storage works because it will still be working in 20 years. Not so with batteries, at least yet. The liquid metal battery has some promise here.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
1. the household electricity consumption is only a minor part, the most is consumed by the industry, and you need to provide storage capacity for them as well.
2. The regenerative power like wind and solar is subject for a major saisonal fluctuations. Which means, the storage needs to be able to load all the energy during one season with high production and keep it for months so you can use it in a season with low production.
3. Currently, Germany is in a "20% scenario". We already have the highest electricity prices in the world (for a major country) ~26 âct/kWh and the import/export saldo in the area of 15% of total production. The electricity prices will likely increase by another 3-4 cents next year and so far there's no end to the price hike in sight.
In Germany, the electricity production/use is ~7500kWh per capita, so 1MWh storage is sufficient for just about 50 days. Considering that the assured production of wind power is below 1% (that is, 200MW in the entire country with over 25GW wind turbines) of installed capacity at 99% of assured supply (that would mean 3.5 days of blackout per year on average, in reality we have only ~15min, or 99.997% assured supply here), it's not that astonishing at all.
Coal doesn't react well to load changes and so you have "cheap" nighttime electric.
And, now, Wind costs less than Oil and onshore very close to Coal.
Just because you use the words "still cheaper" doesn't make it so.
http://lmbcorporation.com/ Soon(tm)
Liquid Metal Battery Corporation
"investors include Bill Gates"
Oh, and about pumped storage: yes, it's the most cost-efficient storage method, but for the dimensions we are talking about, it requires too much space. For comparison: currently available pumped storage in Germany is 40GWh. In a regenerative 100% scenario, 80TWh would be required, the 2000-fold increase. Currently, there is a plan to build another storage sea with 14GWh, it's been in planning for the last 15 years and is currently confronted with massive lawsuits from the public who want to stop the project at any cost (nobody wants to have a huge concrete sea in their backyard), so it's anything but certain if it ever is going to be built.
S/He needs the visibility !
Maybe we deserve this world ?
1) Quite true. Nonetheless, the figure is still quite extreme. The *entire day*'s power consumption for *50 days*? I mean, that's ridiculous, especially on an interconnected grid. If the sun's not shining in Germany, it's probably shining in Morrocco. If the wind isn't blowing in Scotland, it's probably blowing in Greece. Etc. And for those rare cases when *all types* of renewables are underperforming at the *same time*, you then fire up fossil peaking to make up that ~5% or so of your total electricity production. In such a scenario you should need no more than a couple days' worth of storage at most.
2) While wind doesn't track consumption requirements, solar generally does pretty well. Inter-seasonal variations are handled by geographic and generation-mix diversity.
3) This list contradicts your "most expensive" price claim. Plus, citing raw price figures is horribly distorting as so much can affect them (especially taxes and subsidies which vary a lot between countries regardless of levels of subsidy for renewables). Look at Ireland, for example - overwhelmingly fossil fuels, tiny renewable segment, yet they pay more than you for power. Or Sweden for an even more ridiculous example - they're 44% hydropower, which is generally cheap, almost no wind or solar, and yet they pay more than you.
4) "Assured production" for a single wind farm is one of the most stupid and meaningless metrics you could possibly come up with. The figures I've seen cited for wind distributed among farms across a couple hundred kilometers is that about a third of it is as reliable as baseload.
5) The concept that the grid can't deal with intermittency is absurd, because *demand* is already intermittent. Having intermittent demand is for all practical purposes the same as intermittent supply. And the same solutions apply - diversity, distribution, storage, and peaking.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
I've no idea where you come up with 1MWh/person. That's ludicrous. For a household, 20kWh is sufficient... I've got 10kWh in my off grid capable system - SLA batteries, and I can run continuously in April - Sept off of 3440W of solar (I did this in June during a blackout and forgot to switch back for 4 days). With the other 10kWh and another 2kW of solar I could run all winter (I've got a backup generator that gets used during heavy winter storms). This is for me and my girlfriend living on a farm, with a refrigerator, freezer, well pump, electric ignite oil furnace and water heater, and electric dryer. Sealed lead acid has a daily use life of 3-5 years. I'm going to upgrade in a year or so to some form of LiIon, which will go 6000 charge cycles, about the life of my panels. That 6000 charge cycle life, btw, is the cycles until the charge capacity goes down by 30% - which matters a great deal on an electric car, but for a house means you add more batteries. Anyway, if you're keeping track that's 10kWh/person.
Industrial and commercial facilities are going to have industrial solutions, like pump hydro or flow batteries. I work at a pump hydro plant in upstate NY, and we store 16GWh of power, which is enough to run NYC metro for two hours under normal load conditions. We've got 150 people working here... because we're a bureaucracy... but we could do this with 10. There are dozens of locations that could be built for this up here (my organization runs another pump hydro in the state but we originally were going to build 12). In other words, there are no technical reasons NY state could not be 100% renewables, right now... it would probably double the cost of our electricity in the short run. OTOH, eventually we'd need no fuel.
3. Currently, Germany is in a "20% scenario". We already have the highest electricity prices in the world (for a major country) ~26 âct/kWh and the import/export saldo in the area of 15% of total production. The electricity prices will likely increase by another 3-4 cents next year and so far there's no end to the price hike in sight.
Germany might be a horrible example as the political system there seems to insist making bad choices while shutting down the nuclear powerplants.
Look at your northern neighbours instead: Denmark. In the year 2011 the electricity used in Denmark was 28% wind and 11% other renewable energy (solar, biomass, imported hydroelectric power from Sweden and Norway, etc). 41% of electricity produced in Denmark was from renewable sources while only 39% electricity used was from renewable sources. This is because Denmark will sell a lot of wind generated power to neighbours (eg. Norway) and later buy some of it back from the big hydroelectric dams in Norway.
In year 2020 Denmark will have 78% of the used electric power from renewable sources. 48% will be from wind.
There is no "battery" as such needed. Not even pumped storage. The trick is to use wind and solar when available. And power from the dams and bio when there is a lack of wind and solar.
That's my feeling. We slaves aren't allowed self sufficiency from our masters as we might be around a bit longer. Out overmasters don't have to be too concerned with little Tokelau as you say, under water sooner than later I think. That coupled with the fact that NZ is one of the least corrupt countries on the planet least in many studies, with highest quality of life for cities - Auckland and Wellington are up there, vastly ahead of all US cities. It's no surprise the US would be having a nosy in NZ bit torrent affairs etc. to spread their corruption to that land.
2) While wind doesn't track consumption requirements, solar generally does pretty well. Inter-seasonal variations are handled by geographic and generation-mix diversity.
This depends on your location. For Denmark wind actually tracks consumption very well. The country uses much more electricity during the cold winter months compared to summer. And wind produces more during winter as well. If the country were to build 100% wind about 70% of the power would be produced when needed.
Don't know where you think you got your information on where pump hydro can work; Lewiston is a pump hydro at Niagara Falls... if you've ever visited the Buffalo area that's where the midwest begins. It's flat. The topology needed could be found in probably every state in the country (about 200 feet of head). That reservoir is almost entirely a man made creation (earth berms).
Pump hydro needs 1.3 MWh for every 1 MWh returned to the grid later. That is true end to end efficiency. It's comparable to any battery in efficiency, but is several orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries. We just LEM'd (life extension and maintenance) our pump hydro plant (16GWh delivered at 1.2GW) after 40 years in service at a cost of $135M.
http://www.nypa.gov/press/2010/100610a.html
Probably this plant was say $1.3Bn one time cost to build in 2012 dollars (based on Bath County being 50% bigger at $1.7Bn); I know we were about ~$100M in 1970. That's a one time cost... since we pump and gen we don't develop silting issues. We cost $11M to run annually, because we're a bureaucracy. We could be run full auto or at a much lower staff. Still, that's 16GWh at >$.001/Wh annually. This is why global capacity of pump hydro is increasingly quickly in areas with lots of renewables (the EU is adding about 30% more capacity by 2020).
But anyway, there's also molten salt Stirling engine solar, which can't ramp (because of heat constraints), and in effect can run all night... eliminating the need for any external storage.
http://inhabitat.com/nevadas-new-molten-salt-solar-plant-will-produce-power-long-after-the-sun-sets/
> Also this BS argument I constantly see without facts to back it up that some how solar cells release so much CO2 in their manufacture that they can't possibly offset the CO2 over their lives.
You here the same for energy saving light bulbs, etc.
As a first ballpark estimate you can assume that even manufacturers have to pay for their energy. So if it is economical feasible the CO2 balance can't be that bad.
Actual there is data on that available. It is called energy pay back time. It is less than a year for solar thermal and wind energy. It is about 2 years for current nuclear plants. It is about 3 years for solar cells rapidly going down to 1 year anticipated for thin film technology.
Of course there are big variations (about a faktor of two in both directions) depending on many parameters.
Land area for pumped storage. As described in my post above, a 95-5 solution should take no more than a couple days buffer, perhaps 60kWh per person. Germany's population is about 82m. Assume an average height difference of 100m, only two-reservoir plants (we'll assume no coastal plants), assuming an average reservoir depth of 20m, and a throughput efficiency of 80%, we get 15,7MJ/m = 4,4kWh/m = 13,8 m^2/person = 1132km^2. Germany is 357021 km^2. The lake requirement is a third of a percent of the size of Germany. Where's the problem? Too many land usage? Go with a 90% solution and cut your storage requirements down to maybe 15kWh per person and your lake area down to less than a tenth of a percent of the land of Germany. That'd be like the US having all of its energy stored by one Delaware or two Rhode Islands.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
there's a certain segment of society that listens to faux news and reads the drudge report and faithfully accepts the propaganda from the oligopolies who want to retain their rent-seeking parasite status on our societies. why these people's minds are so beholden to the corporate propaganda and the well-paid demagogues is beyond my understanding. some people retain open minds, other minds close up and never think critically again, and are forever more enthralled to the propaganda channels that, for some reason, they dutifully accept without any resistance. it's a strange world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You need to pump the water to a higher level, so i can't see how a lot of flat areas are any good. Most pump storage i have seen/looked/wiki'ed are more or less in location that look like normal dams... Somewhere where there is a decent head so the lake does not need to be too huge. The energy for 1m^3 of water 10 meter high is about 1000*9.81*10 or approximately 100kJ. So for 16GWh with only say 10meters of head, you need 580 million cubic meters, or about 8x8 km at 10 meter deep (almost 6000Ha). So you going to need something really massive if you want to have enough for NY city for example, because 16GWh is just not that much.
Of course these things work well with smaller heads but then you need far bigger lakes or whatever. Once you run the numbers, properly, it does not look good. Pumped storage is niche solution. It works for only a few places and cases, not generally.
Also consider that 6000Ha of solar panels is going to get you a *alot* of power even as far north as the Falls. Its on the order of about 8GW at peek, so this lake can only store 2 hours of full production! That is the problem with energy storage... its a truly massive about of energy to store, many orders of magnitude than anything we have done or even considered before. Even adding 30% more or very little is still very little.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
2 years for current nuclear plants? Do you have a citation for that? That seems pretty low. My impression of "current nuclear plants" is they are frigging expensive. You need lots of concrete so that stuff can't crash through, and stuff can't blow out. And for many you need huge expensive high quality steel containers.
I read this a few year ago and current can't find it again.
It might be that this number ist the energy for producing the plant divided by the average electrical power. This would mean that the energy for running the plant and for producing the fuel is not considerd. Sorry I don't have a better source.
What I do find a lot are sources on the average amount of CO2 produced by nuclear power. It is a lot worse than wind and hydro but somewhat better than solar if the uranium does not come from south africa.
And? You think there's not the fraction of a percent of land that isn't flat?
Try crunching the numbers some time on how much power can be stored in the US just from the small difference between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan-Huron. It's pretty starggering, despite them being in the Great Plains.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
And how realistic is that we create lakes the size of the great lakes everywhere? Where in Europe would you put them for example. I am not saying pump storage does not work. What i am saying is that it does not work generally. Seriously Lake Superior is the largest lake in the *world* by area IIRC.
Guess how much energy is in 10000 tons of depleted U? Its a lot. Oh yes its a lot...
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Mary Ann: Oh Professor! It is sooooo hot here. (rubs her hands down her sweat soaked skin) I think we need to go swimming just the two of us.
Professor: I think it is very encouraging how all 7 of us can have these modern conveniences with some coconuts and bamboo creatively assembled. Don’t you?
Mary Ann: Oh yes professor! Tell me more more... I’m soooo hot. (begins to slowly slowly mind you remove articles of clothing)
Professor: If I could only figure out a way to harness solar energy, that is, energy given off by the sun, in mass quantities, we might someday have refrigeration and air conditioning. Just think Mary Ann! You need not be sweaty ever again, and some day that technology could be used to power entire islands of people (no more than 1500 mind you) and give them energy independence. Wouldn’t that be incredible?
Mary Ann: Professor, you talk too much about clean energy. Let me show you what dirty energy really looks like!
(end scene with dissolve and theme music)
In case you didn't notice, the Great Lakes already exist.
And nobody's talking about recreating them elsewhere.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
I remember hearing about this flywheel installation for stored energy. I'm not sure how much those cost or store but could make more sense than pumped water reservoirs in Hawaii.
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
BG (Blenheim Gilboa) - the pump hydro I work at - does 16GWh.
This is its pond ("landlocked" body of water on the right):
http://goo.gl/maps/srKH2
As you can see, less than a square mile. If you look at the Walmart in nearby Cobleskill that takes up about 1/10 the land area (which serves probably a population of 10 or 20k, to think about whether this is a viable use of land). That's with about 1000 ft of head. But that's a lot. Here's Lewiston's:
http://goo.gl/maps/HUhsx
Not a lot bigger, but actually has 4 times the volume and stores half as much energy total, given its head of 70-120 feet.
http://www.wnypapers.com/news/article/current/2010/07/03/100238/nypa-to-upgrade-lewiston-pump-generating-plant
If you streetview in the area from the bridge you can see this. They took an area that is basically flat and used a marginal hill, and turned it into a reservoir with earth berms.
(Streetview: http://goo.gl/maps/0uddr)
You need say 4 more BG's or 8 more Lewistons to cover the NYC metro (about 1/30th of US population) at night assuming solar PV only. If you add a mix of wind (which generates variably but does generate at night) over wide geographic areas, and concentrating solar power towers that generate at night, that greatly reduces the amount of storage needed to maybe double what NY State has currently. But just assuming solar PV, we've got an upper limit of say about two square miles (given upper and lower reservoirs) of surface per million people if you pick areas with ~100 feet of head. I think we might have ruled out Delaware. That's about it. But they've got Maryland.
We're 125 mi from NYC. We're also its black start facility. I.e., at worst 125 miles is a reasonable distance for this storage on the bulk electric system (but in reality hundreds of miles is certainly viable.) So in physical terms, you're wrong. The reason we're not currently doing this more is that natural gas seems to be cheaper and newer gas plants are almost as responsive as we are (effectively making them swing generation). When gas isn't $2 mmBTU this will probably no longer be true.
Right... now find enough places to that in Europe.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I'm not sure if the size of population matters - with more population, you have more money. So the question is, how does the economics of the system scale on a per-capita basis?
If it's affordable on a per-capita basis for 1400 people, why not 140 million people?
It's an interesting experiment at a small scale which will help answer either if solar is viable (technically and financially) at a smaller scale, or not.
I would point out that I doubt that this tiny pacific island has much in the way of heavy industry, however. I think wind and solar could potentially (if they get cheap enough), become a larger portion of the U.S. and other developed nations economies (perhaps something like 40-50% of total generation. I don't think for an industrialized nation, it can become 100% of the power grid - industry uses just too much power.
Also - I wonder how much air conditioning is used on that island? I imagine that, since historically their electric has been expensive, they probably largely haven't depended a lot on A/C? I also wonder what the weather is like there? South Pacific, I believe, is pretty much warm year 'round - but does it ever really get stiflingly hot like it does in places on the mainland (in Ohio, where I live, and surrounding states, back at the end of June and beginning of July, we had 2 or 3 weeks of 100+ degree days).
Finally we're on the road to being huddled around the very last solar panel in a freezing cave, wailing "If we could only figure out how to get enough energy out of it to make another one, this would be the best technology ever invented. Ethics shall triumph over physics, just have faith."
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How about using the great lakes as a storage basin, especially since the great lakes are actually slowly draining. This would also help with keeping the shipping lanes open as I know they have to do a fair amount of dredging. Of course that would need to be handled by the feds as it would also require cooperation by Canada. Another solution would be to dam off half of some old open pit mines and use those for pumped hydro storage. Some of them can be quite massive and the process of digging them out has already been done.
Time to offend someone
To reiterate the point, since you apparently missed it: the Great Lakes are an example of how even extremely poorly-cited natural bodies of water can have huge power generation potentials. It was not a proposal to "recreate the Great Lakes", which would be idiotic. See the calculations elsewhere in this thread that show that for Germany to store nearly a day's worth of power for everyone (assuming 100m elevation changes, 20m-deep reservoirs, and 80% efficiency), it would take less than a tenth of a percent of the country's land (the US equivalent would be "one Delaware or two Rhode Islands to store all of the US's power). On a diversified, geographically-interlinked grid, that kind of power storage could give you at least 90% of your power from clean renewables.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
I read that as "Tokelau Becomes First Country To Go 100% Sober" - I'm not even a drinker and even I shuddered at how horrible it sounded!
You're claiming there's a shortage of mountains in Europe?
Where are you getting the concept that the space requirements are absurd? Europe consumes about 3000TWh annually, or about 8.2 TWh per day. To store a 24-hour day's power (enough to have an overwhelming majority of your power come from renewables - handling everything but the rare trans-continental multi-source shortfall), that's about 500 BGs. In an area the size of *Europe*. Why do you think this is a problem? I don't get your objection.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
Exactly. Also there are studies showing if you can integrate wind over a large enough area you basically get a flat 27% of nameplate capacity 99% of the time. Pump hydro (or another storage technology) just needs to be there on some scale to level the rest. And it's not like every gas turbine needs to be demo'd... we've typically got 18% spare capacity for dispatch in the US, I imagine it's the same in Europe (or more).
Seriously? 500! And you don't see the problem? Well lucky your here so we can all be on renewables in 20 years.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Ignoring that solar energy comes from outside, it's a small closed system.
Many islands and entire continents are, or at one time were, closed systems from an energy perspective if you ignore wind and solar being inherently "from outside."
Again, if you ignore that solar is "from outside," the Planet Earth is a "closed system" as well.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
By the way, Seattle WA has roughly 70% of the annual insolation of Los Angeles, and significantly more than e.g. most of Germany where solar panels have become very popular. Seattle along with the rest of the lower 48 is a perfectly viable location for solar power in terms of availability. However, our grid electricity is pretty cheap and already renewable as it mostly comes from hydro power, so there's no urgency to switch. And everybody who has access to a natural gas line uses that to heat their home, because that's even cheaper than the cheap electricity.
Seriously? The the area of the entire continent of Europe? Don't think there's room?
If you're talking about the scale of building that, the scale of building *everything* humans do nowadays is immense. For example, cement is just one component of concrete. The world uses 4,600,000,000,000 (4.6 quadrillion) pounds of cement every year. In concrete terms, that's probably around 20,000,000,000,000 pounds. That number should double to 40,000,000,000,000 pounds of concrete by 2030. That's 243,000 Washington Monuments every year.
Humans build a *LOT* of stuff.
The chloride owes the sodium money.
FWIW, Tokelau is on the US Department of State's list of "Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty", as well as the United Nations' list of "Non-Self-Governing Territories", the latter because it is considered to be a colony of New Zealand.
The world wide *total* number of dams with more than 1GW output is only 171. Much of that cement was used to make those dams. The current planned/build pump storage with capacity over 1GW is only 63. That is world wide.... that is 234 dams in total. Its has taken how long and how much to build that? And you suggest that 500 more in Europe alone is no big deal?
Oh and don't forget energy consumption is going up, not down. And we still have the rest of the world to go.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
1) This storage capacity was calculated by simulating wind, solar etc. output based on real weather data. It already assumed a realistic mix of renewables including ones with adjustable output such as biogas and a realistic possibilities of export/import.
And about "firing up fossil plants for a few days in a year". Just imagine what would any electricity company do if they had a power plant that they would be able to use only a few days a year? They would immediately close and dismantle it and fire the staff, because the maintenance and standby costs would dwarf any profit from it.
Actually, this effect can already be seen here in Germany. We're far away from 100% renewables, yet in the wake of closure of several NPPs, and the ever increasing demand for backup power because of growing renewable supply, there is a huge debate about building additional coal and gas power plants. One would guess there's a gold rush building these? Nope. The major electricity producers already said that unless they can fire them close to 24/365, there's simply no profit in building them. The government would have to do the despicable and actually start subsidizing coal and gas power plants if they want a stable supply.
2. Solar might have a generation curve that matches the daily consumption. But seasonally, it doesn't match the consumption at all. The season of the peak consumption in Germany is WINTER, because of less natural light and warmth. At the same time, the solar production is very low in winter, it falls way below 5% of what it does in the summer. It's the saisonal fluictuations that need the storage, not daily.
3. This list is obviously bullshit. It lists Germany with THE AVERAGE PRICE of 27 $ct/kWh. it's like 21.5 euroct/kWh. I'd like that price! Where can I get it?
If you look at verivox.de, there's a price calculator at the top. You can enter the postal code (try 10000-13000 for Berlin) and your expected consumption to get the cheapest tariffs. The cheapest one I get is 411 euros for 1700 kWh a year. That's ~30 US-cents/kWh in the current conversion ratio. However it's a prepaid package which everyone would recommend to stay the hell away from. Last year a major "cheap" supplier suddenly went bankrupt and many people lost their prepaid electricity packages. The average prices are much higher, typically around 26-27 euroct/kWh.
About the taxes: the major factor is in the recent price increase in Germany was indeed a tax - a sort of a tax that is levied on the electricity consumers and used to pay the renewable electricity producers.
4. Well, guess what? Germany is a couple of hundreds kilometers long. Yet the wind power manages to fluctuate between near zero and the maximum all the time!
1. Tokelau is not a country, it's a group of 3 atolls.
2. It's 10 km^2 in size with a population of 1400.
3. Must be slow news day.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Another AC citing bullshit and seeding FUD.
Fuck the hell off.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I sincerely hope you're not considered the optimist in your family.
Europe has a well interconnected grid and more links are being built. There's still some room for pumped hydro in the UK, Scandinavia and Belgium
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
What you propose is about 5TWh of total storage. Currently there are 40GWh. Increasing the current capacity 125-fold is just as unrealistic as increasing it 2000-fold, seeing how a company who now tries to push plans for the 13GWh pumped storage Atdorf (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumpspeicherkraftwerk_Atdorf#Pumpspeicherkraftwerk_Atdorf , sorry, no English version) has been struggled for years with their plans, primarily against the opposition of the Green party.
So your plans is to build a ~30-by-30 kilometers sea that is elevated by 100 meters. Do you even realize how giant this thing is? It's the size of Berlin! Do you realize that you also need to multiple it by 2, since you also need a sea at the low level to store the water?
80TWh will never happen, and 5TWh won't happen either, and 1TWh is maybe realistic within 200 years or so. The renewable revolution will not happen, all we're doing now is going back to burning lignite and gas.
First off:
1) Hydropower is only a quarter of the world's electricity consumption. That is, roughly 3 quarters of energy-production resources have gone elsewhere. Multiply your figure by four.
2) I don't have a list of 1GW power stations, but Wikipedia has a list of 2GW ones. The breakdown (ones with multiple years are represented as fractions):
Pre-1950: 2
1950-1960: 2,3
1960-1970: 6,5
1970-1980: 10,7
1980-1990: 13,1
1990-2000: 5,3
2000-2010: 8,6
2010-2012: 5,5 extrapolated: to 2020: 18,3
Notice something? Yeah, they're (roughly) being built at significantly increased rates, corresponding to the world's increased power demands and the world's dramatically increasing industrial output. In fact, if you extrapolate the rate of plants being built in the 2010s (note: the one that had completion dates in the future, I omitted, since I had no way to know whether there were other completion dates of plants in the future that weren't listed), you'd get over a quarter of them produced this decade. Just the first three years of the 2010s produced as many large hydro plants as all of the 1990s. And its not like those were three freak years - most of the 1990s production was in the latter 1990s, 3 of them in 1999 alone.
Plus, focusing just on large hydro is probably distorting, since one tends to use up large-hydro opportunities first and then move down to smaller hydro.
Third, the whole argument is moot because *we already have cost figures for pumped hydro*, and they're not expensive. Cost is a measure of the amount of economic output something requires to produce, operate, and maintain. Pumped hydro is usually a little over a penny per kilowatt hour. Given that generating that power costs many times more, potentially even over an order of magnitude more, you can see that the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the pumped hydro plant is an order of magnitude less than the cost to produce, operate, and maintain the power plants. Do you think people are going to stop producing the power plants they need because they're "too expensive" or "take up too much resources"?
The chloride owes the sodium money.
Plus, focusing just on large hydro is probably distorting, since one tends to use up large-hydro opportunities first and then move down to smaller hydro.
How is this different from pump storage. Where the first ones get the best and cheapest sites, but later ones get more expensive because they need to be built in less optimal ones. Also you need more that a mountain, you need water, so the worst sites are going to need lakes for both sides doubling impact and probably cost.
*we already have cost figures for pumped hydro*
No we don't, we have figures for existing ones that got the best and cheapest sites. Tell me what the cost of *500* more in Europe? It is totally unrealistic for a real solution. Its only nice if all you want to do is talk about how easy it would be... Which is *not* a practical engineering solution.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Only thing I found that has 2 years.
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com.au/2008/04/energy-payback-times-for-nuclear.html
It isn't. That's my point. People are building more and more hydro at inxcreasing rates, even despite being limited to areas with existing rivers, which are many orders of magnitude rarer than areas that simply have large altitude differences (which is a huge chunk of the entire planet).
Even if you accept that future will be more expensive - which I don't, as power plants and storage mechanisms generally get cheaper over time (modern dams are much cheaper per unit power than early dams, for example) - it needs to increase in price by an *order of magnitude* to be ruled out. Not going to happen.
The chloride owes the sodium money.