Actually, no. They are not. Spain is way behind. This tech was developed in America back in the 70's and 80's and are light years ahead of the Spanish. That is why China came in here trying to buy up a bunch (brightsource should be shot for selling out). What Spain is doing is one family is paying low prices to workers there and trying to do the Chinese approach to it. But their tech is an easy decade behind.
Sometimes, HTML sux. I should have previewed. Here is the situation:
1) The salt storage is cheap to add (you need a lined storage that holds high temps, ideally buried in the ground).
2) The ave. price paid for incoming energy / efficiency >= ave demand price.
Roughly, that would be 2 x the incoming price (50% efficiency), and the ave. demand price is fairly high since many of the systems will run a diesel or natural gas turbine (very high maintenance; low efficiency compared to a boiler).
I know that in Colorado, Exel would be profitable on this. Would that happen all over? Not sure. Some of the places are required to pay loads of money to AE. When that occurs, then no. It will not be profitable. OTH, it might be worth it considering that fuel costs can be expected to go up.
It remains economic depending on several situations:
The salt storage is cheap to add (you need a lined storage that holds high temps, ideally buried in the ground).
2 * price paid for the incoming energy
One other interesting issue with this. It gives you energy during a major outage. By having a distributed supply, we gain by having energy available at various times. That is very useful for post storms. Right now, we are looking at those old coal plants being shut down and then energy from outside of cities only. With the coal plants converted, it could give you several days (keep in mind that even if you only do minimal storage of say a day, that post storm, you have minimal demand, so it will take longer to drain).
Yes, hydro storage is nice. It is ONLY useful OR economical in certain areas. And it has loads of inefficiency as well as high upfront costs. OTH, Thermal storage that replaces a CLOSED DOWN COAL PLANT has next to no upfront costs, and can be put ANYWHERE. If designed decently, you will get about 50% losses. Efficiency is not the real issue. ECONOMICS IS. It costs lots to do diesel turbines for demand power. They are cheap to add, but expensive to run. But with these thermal storage, you can store excess power. Right now, the vast majority of wind generators are feathered at night. That is, we throw away all power from them. Likewise, there are times that we throw away excess solar power. But this storage would change that. Most of the power generated would be less costly than using diesel turbines. However, when using heavy base-load power, esp. coal, to load it, then you lose. OTH, if you use nukes to load it for HEAVY draws, then not as big of an issue.
You obviously did not think. The energy company will capture any excess energy day/night. For AE power, that will normally mean less than what you can buy it at wholesale. In addition, the storage will give back during the DAYTIME when it is needed. When you have hot day's coming, you then run your local generator a bit harder at night to load the storage. You will lose some due to inefficiency, however, for most of the USA, that will occur for less than 14 days out of the year. In the mean time, this storage allows us to capture ALL EXCESS AE power and use it as needed.
I have been a big proponent of small nuclear reactors of about 100 MW size. In particular, I think that GA should re-do Ft. St. Vrain in a small reactor (the world's first and only production level thorium reactor).
HOWEVER, with Japan, do you think that is realistic?
The idea of using storage is that some amount of energy is wasted each day. However, if we have an ECONOMICAL sink for it, then we can use this to replace demand generators. For most of the USA, that means that it will be used for AE storage during evening as well as fall/spring days. During the summer (and winter for some areas), it will need input nightly from regular base-load plants esp. during hot periods. That is not an issue. Yes, it will burn more coal during those days, HOWEVER, it will also allow AE power to be used 24x7. And with it being CHEAP to install, well....
Well, first off, most of this WAS developed by NASA AND DOD. Back in the 50's and 60's, and then again in the 80's. It was found that material science was not good enough. It is likely that NASA will offer up contracts for working with this in the next couple of years. And my guess is that they are MUCH further ahead on this.
This will use a combined solar thermal collector/salt storage, powering a thermal engine. Not a problem. However, what that does is use the solar thermal to heat the storage and then power it all nightlong. So, for example, if you want a 100 MW output 24x7, you will need 300-400 MW tower (a lot more money). Not an issue. BUT, the storage is what is important. It would be better for the companies going into this, to split out the storage portion and make it distributed. In particular, America has a large number of OLD coal-based power plants that are going to go away over the next 20-30 years. Many of these are currently inside of cities. They are typically 50-100 MW in size (which was large monsters in the day). They have power lines that emanate from them. They also have cooling plants (typically, water), combined with steam engines/generators. But all that is really needed to be changed is that piping re-upped, and the coal boiler dropped. Instead, put in a high temp salt storage system, and use electricity to bring the temp up. With this approach, you can have a large CHEAP battery. The argument against it will be the inefficiency of it. There will be a loss of energy of roughly 50%. However, current tech with CASE, Hydro, batteries, etc. all have losses of 20-40% or so, but have many drawbacks. Hydro and Case can only be used in certain areas and are expensive. Batteries are VERY expensive to install, though they have the advantage of going anywhere.
In the end, the question should not be how efficient it is, but how economical it is. A thermal storage that has little costs to set-up, but will last for 20-30 years (within 10-15 years, ultra-caps will become the dominant form of new storage, and would then replace this). That approach extends this equipment for very little costs. More importantly, it would enable ALL FORMS of Alternative Energy to provide power as they can, since the salt storage would act as a buffer for demand systems. Right now, America loses something like 12 GW yearly because they have to feather wind generators at night. Likewise, we have gas turbine generator that are built to handle the demand, esp. when AE falls. With a thermal storage, it provide our demand system, while allowing AE to run at full power.
Actually, UK is not similar. UK's approach is the same one that ATT and later, US's RBOCs had. Roughly, what we call a central office, is the 'Main Distribution Frame (MDF) in the exchange' from that wiki. That portion has a length of maybe 30 meters all the way to say 30 km. The problem with that, is that the RBOCs had little incentives to upgrade that network, since it benefits their competitors as much as them. OTH, By doing the block-level 'greenbox' then the competitors have to install various lines of their own. The advantage is that some will put in a simple star configuration (low costs, but prone to outages), while others will put in a ring configuration (higher costs, but requires multiple cuts to lose the connection). Note that the overall system costs is actually higher with what I suggest, but I count on REAL competition to bring it down. Right now, there is a reason why comcast is able to buy NBC and other companies, and it has NOTHING to with competition.
Oh, it is VERY obvious to the pols here. That is why they get LOADS of money from Comcast, Time-warner, etc to NOT do this.
Real Competition would bring REAL FAST services here, but it would mean that profits would be minimal.
wrong. Doing 20 runs of fiber down the street is exactly what you want. It gives loads of excess fiber and more importantly, redundancy. In addition, with competition, we will see upgrades galore. Each network provider will break their backs to lower their costs and improve delivery. Where you run into trouble is if the monopoly is from home to a CO. When that happens, then the company has little incentive to upgrade from CO to home (in fact, they have a strong disincentive). Look at the RBOCs with their twisted pair. It took competition to get them to move forward on doing anything. And even then it was not much. So the answer here is to do the greenbox (basically, block level) to the home. By doing a monopoly, ONLY in your block, you just solved the most expensive part of any network to the providers. It costs loads of money for that portion. The rest costs a great deal less. In fact, I would guess that the monopoly would charge 15-30/month just for that piece. THe good news is that with competition, you can expect to get 100 MB drops for say 20/month, HD cable for 20/month, with phone for 10-20. We would likely see video phone usage jump.
However, while nationalization of the whole system makes ZERO sense, it might be possible for localities (cities, counties, perhaps states) to consider the idea of doing a locality-owned monopoly of fiber to the residency/greenbox and then doing 10 year contracts for the maintenance. THere are places that I think that the national system can work (for example, I do believe that the feds should allow a private medicare system to compete against insurance), but normally, when real assets are involved, the larger gov is too expensive, and to complicated.
Well, of course, there will be cable bashing. I use comcast at home, and I KNOW that they hit netflix HARD. I run a router at home and have studied the data coming through. When it comes from a work site, I can download 4 GB no problem. However, when I grab netflix movies that are about 2 gb streams, then I get issues. Interestingly, Crackle and Hulu do not have the same issues, though crackle uses more bandwidth.
Personally, I agree that they own the network and should be allowed to do what they want. HOWEVER, I also think that we should pass laws FORBIDDING a monopoly into the home. At the least, we should change the monopoly to be from the home to the greenbox and any company can then sign up for a deal with providing service to the greenboxes, AT THE SAME RATES. IOW, if comcast wants to own the greenbox-home monopoly, not a problem. However, they charge other providers the same price that they charge the rest of comcast.
Basically, it is time to limit the monopoly's size.
Seriously. Cisco has helped Chinese leaders and their minions attack loads of western computers and steal money,info from them. Perhaps, if a group lawsuit is done, this could be taken on in a large way.
Ideally, it would lead Cisco to pull out of China.
They do not care if they lost their entire investment in America. Not ONE BIT. The fact is, that they had no choice BUT TO BUY AMERICAN BONDS. WHy? Because they have been manipulating their money against the dollar. If they had not invested the dollars back into America, their money would suffer 1000's of % inflation. As it is, they are thought to be at 50% inflation and rising.
But Chinese' leaders would gladly suffer 2000% inflation AND give up their investment, if they could destroy the west.
But, we saw that back in the 50,60,70's, in which Americans thought that USSR was NOT out to destroy USA.
American, and actually western, leadership MUST CONSIDER WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
China is not here to be allies. They are here to conqueror via economic first and then military later.
Basically, because the solution being proposed is a REAL BAD ONE. Simple as that. It will not fix global warming, since it is GLOBAL CAUSED. Instead, it will point to a minority of nations and tell them to stop their emissions, while ignoring some of the biggest and newest ones coming.
We need to get China and India to stop this. China a LONG history of not caring about the environment. The issue is that they will continue this because it is profitable to them. Even now, it is growing 15% a year, which is INSANE.
That gov. efficiency starts with intelligent scientists and engineers? Perhaps it is time that we simply hire decent ppl, rather than ppl like reagan and W.
You should run the numbers. You would find out that 10% would break the gov. Instead, it would need to be around 20%, and then once we have paid off reagan's/bush/W's, and now Obama's debt, THEN we can bring it down to 15%.
fairtax will not work. Ask any small brick/morters how it is working against the net. The fact is, the ONLY way that fair tax would work is if every nation on this planet agreed to tax the net. Otherwise, companies will simply flow to the net and avoid brick/mortor. Just look at Amazon.
I look forward to multiple rockets coming to private space. In addition, one of them (spaceX) is CHEAP to fly. The only thing that will beat it anytime soon will be the chinese since they will simply cheat and subsidize it (illegally, but china does not care about that).
Now, the problem is that CONgress continues trying to make NASA into a jobs bill. They had their CONstellation, and thankfully, it was killed. Now, we have SLS, as laid out by CONgress on HOW TO BUILD A ROCKET, TIMELINES, and MONEY. Yes, the same congress that can not balance a fucking budget, avoid wars, deal with illegals, deal with CHina, and YET, they think that they are able to design a rocket better than NASA.
Just fucking amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. They are not. Spain is way behind. This tech was developed in America back in the 70's and 80's and are light years ahead of the Spanish. That is why China came in here trying to buy up a bunch (brightsource should be shot for selling out). What Spain is doing is one family is paying low prices to workers there and trying to do the Chinese approach to it. But their tech is an easy decade behind.
Sometimes, HTML sux. I should have previewed. Here is the situation:
1) The salt storage is cheap to add (you need a lined storage that holds high temps, ideally buried in the ground).
2) The ave. price paid for incoming energy / efficiency >= ave demand price.
Roughly, that would be 2 x the incoming price (50% efficiency), and the ave. demand price is fairly high since many of the systems will run a diesel or natural gas turbine (very high maintenance; low efficiency compared to a boiler).
I know that in Colorado, Exel would be profitable on this. Would that happen all over? Not sure. Some of the places are required to pay loads of money to AE. When that occurs, then no. It will not be profitable. OTH, it might be worth it considering that fuel costs can be expected to go up.
One other interesting issue with this. It gives you energy during a major outage. By having a distributed supply, we gain by having energy available at various times. That is very useful for post storms. Right now, we are looking at those old coal plants being shut down and then energy from outside of cities only. With the coal plants converted, it could give you several days (keep in mind that even if you only do minimal storage of say a day, that post storm, you have minimal demand, so it will take longer to drain).
Yes, hydro storage is nice. It is ONLY useful OR economical in certain areas. And it has loads of inefficiency as well as high upfront costs. OTH, Thermal storage that replaces a CLOSED DOWN COAL PLANT has next to no upfront costs, and can be put ANYWHERE. If designed decently, you will get about 50% losses. Efficiency is not the real issue. ECONOMICS IS. It costs lots to do diesel turbines for demand power. They are cheap to add, but expensive to run. But with these thermal storage, you can store excess power. Right now, the vast majority of wind generators are feathered at night. That is, we throw away all power from them. Likewise, there are times that we throw away excess solar power. But this storage would change that. Most of the power generated would be less costly than using diesel turbines. However, when using heavy base-load power, esp. coal, to load it, then you lose. OTH, if you use nukes to load it for HEAVY draws, then not as big of an issue.
You obviously did not think. The energy company will capture any excess energy day/night. For AE power, that will normally mean less than what you can buy it at wholesale. In addition, the storage will give back during the DAYTIME when it is needed. When you have hot day's coming, you then run your local generator a bit harder at night to load the storage. You will lose some due to inefficiency, however, for most of the USA, that will occur for less than 14 days out of the year. In the mean time, this storage allows us to capture ALL EXCESS AE power and use it as needed.
I have been a big proponent of small nuclear reactors of about 100 MW size. In particular, I think that GA should re-do Ft. St. Vrain in a small reactor (the world's first and only production level thorium reactor).
HOWEVER, with Japan, do you think that is realistic?
The idea of using storage is that some amount of energy is wasted each day. However, if we have an ECONOMICAL sink for it, then we can use this to replace demand generators. For most of the USA, that means that it will be used for AE storage during evening as well as fall/spring days. During the summer (and winter for some areas), it will need input nightly from regular base-load plants esp. during hot periods. That is not an issue. Yes, it will burn more coal during those days, HOWEVER, it will also allow AE power to be used 24x7. And with it being CHEAP to install, well....
Well, first off, most of this WAS developed by NASA AND DOD. Back in the 50's and 60's, and then again in the 80's. It was found that material science was not good enough. It is likely that NASA will offer up contracts for working with this in the next couple of years. And my guess is that they are MUCH further ahead on this.
This will use a combined solar thermal collector/salt storage, powering a thermal engine. Not a problem. However, what that does is use the solar thermal to heat the storage and then power it all nightlong. So, for example, if you want a 100 MW output 24x7, you will need 300-400 MW tower (a lot more money). Not an issue. BUT, the storage is what is important. It would be better for the companies going into this, to split out the storage portion and make it distributed. In particular, America has a large number of OLD coal-based power plants that are going to go away over the next 20-30 years. Many of these are currently inside of cities. They are typically 50-100 MW in size (which was large monsters in the day). They have power lines that emanate from them. They also have cooling plants (typically, water), combined with steam engines/generators. But all that is really needed to be changed is that piping re-upped, and the coal boiler dropped. Instead, put in a high temp salt storage system, and use electricity to bring the temp up. With this approach, you can have a large CHEAP battery. The argument against it will be the inefficiency of it. There will be a loss of energy of roughly 50%. However, current tech with CASE, Hydro, batteries, etc. all have losses of 20-40% or so, but have many drawbacks. Hydro and Case can only be used in certain areas and are expensive. Batteries are VERY expensive to install, though they have the advantage of going anywhere.
In the end, the question should not be how efficient it is, but how economical it is. A thermal storage that has little costs to set-up, but will last for 20-30 years (within 10-15 years, ultra-caps will become the dominant form of new storage, and would then replace this). That approach extends this equipment for very little costs. More importantly, it would enable ALL FORMS of Alternative Energy to provide power as they can, since the salt storage would act as a buffer for demand systems. Right now, America loses something like 12 GW yearly because they have to feather wind generators at night. Likewise, we have gas turbine generator that are built to handle the demand, esp. when AE falls. With a thermal storage, it provide our demand system, while allowing AE to run at full power.
Actually, UK is not similar. UK's approach is the same one that ATT and later, US's RBOCs had. Roughly, what we call a central office, is the 'Main Distribution Frame (MDF) in the exchange' from that wiki. That portion has a length of maybe 30 meters all the way to say 30 km. The problem with that, is that the RBOCs had little incentives to upgrade that network, since it benefits their competitors as much as them. OTH, By doing the block-level 'greenbox' then the competitors have to install various lines of their own. The advantage is that some will put in a simple star configuration (low costs, but prone to outages), while others will put in a ring configuration (higher costs, but requires multiple cuts to lose the connection). Note that the overall system costs is actually higher with what I suggest, but I count on REAL competition to bring it down. Right now, there is a reason why comcast is able to buy NBC and other companies, and it has NOTHING to with competition.
Oh, it is VERY obvious to the pols here. That is why they get LOADS of money from Comcast, Time-warner, etc to NOT do this. Real Competition would bring REAL FAST services here, but it would mean that profits would be minimal.
wrong. Doing 20 runs of fiber down the street is exactly what you want. It gives loads of excess fiber and more importantly, redundancy. In addition, with competition, we will see upgrades galore. Each network provider will break their backs to lower their costs and improve delivery. Where you run into trouble is if the monopoly is from home to a CO. When that happens, then the company has little incentive to upgrade from CO to home (in fact, they have a strong disincentive). Look at the RBOCs with their twisted pair. It took competition to get them to move forward on doing anything. And even then it was not much. So the answer here is to do the greenbox (basically, block level) to the home. By doing a monopoly, ONLY in your block, you just solved the most expensive part of any network to the providers. It costs loads of money for that portion. The rest costs a great deal less. In fact, I would guess that the monopoly would charge 15-30/month just for that piece. THe good news is that with competition, you can expect to get 100 MB drops for say 20/month, HD cable for 20/month, with phone for 10-20. We would likely see video phone usage jump.
However, while nationalization of the whole system makes ZERO sense, it might be possible for localities (cities, counties, perhaps states) to consider the idea of doing a locality-owned monopoly of fiber to the residency/greenbox and then doing 10 year contracts for the maintenance. THere are places that I think that the national system can work (for example, I do believe that the feds should allow a private medicare system to compete against insurance), but normally, when real assets are involved, the larger gov is too expensive, and to complicated.
Well, of course, there will be cable bashing. I use comcast at home, and I KNOW that they hit netflix HARD. I run a router at home and have studied the data coming through. When it comes from a work site, I can download 4 GB no problem. However, when I grab netflix movies that are about 2 gb streams, then I get issues. Interestingly, Crackle and Hulu do not have the same issues, though crackle uses more bandwidth.
Personally, I agree that they own the network and should be allowed to do what they want. HOWEVER, I also think that we should pass laws FORBIDDING a monopoly into the home. At the least, we should change the monopoly to be from the home to the greenbox and any company can then sign up for a deal with providing service to the greenboxes, AT THE SAME RATES. IOW, if comcast wants to own the greenbox-home monopoly, not a problem. However, they charge other providers the same price that they charge the rest of comcast.
Basically, it is time to limit the monopoly's size.
Seriously. Cisco has helped Chinese leaders and their minions attack loads of western computers and steal money,info from them. Perhaps, if a group lawsuit is done, this could be taken on in a large way. Ideally, it would lead Cisco to pull out of China.
Really? Is the US gov. pushing this in our DOD videos? Nope.
They do not care if they lost their entire investment in America. Not ONE BIT. The fact is, that they had no choice BUT TO BUY AMERICAN BONDS. WHy? Because they have been manipulating their money against the dollar. If they had not invested the dollars back into America, their money would suffer 1000's of % inflation. As it is, they are thought to be at 50% inflation and rising. But Chinese' leaders would gladly suffer 2000% inflation AND give up their investment, if they could destroy the west.
But, we saw that back in the 50,60,70's, in which Americans thought that USSR was NOT out to destroy USA.
American, and actually western, leadership MUST CONSIDER WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
China is not here to be allies. They are here to conqueror via economic first and then military later.
Basically, because the solution being proposed is a REAL BAD ONE. Simple as that. It will not fix global warming, since it is GLOBAL CAUSED. Instead, it will point to a minority of nations and tell them to stop their emissions, while ignoring some of the biggest and newest ones coming.
h2 will react ONCE and it is done. CFCs are a catalyst. It will continue to break down O3 over its LONG lifetime.
You can get it from China, TODAY.
We need to get China and India to stop this. China a LONG history of not caring about the environment. The issue is that they will continue this because it is profitable to them. Even now, it is growing 15% a year, which is INSANE.
That gov. efficiency starts with intelligent scientists and engineers? Perhaps it is time that we simply hire decent ppl, rather than ppl like reagan and W.
You should run the numbers. You would find out that 10% would break the gov. Instead, it would need to be around 20%, and then once we have paid off reagan's/bush/W's, and now Obama's debt, THEN we can bring it down to 15%.
EXACTLY.
fairtax will not work. Ask any small brick/morters how it is working against the net. The fact is, the ONLY way that fair tax would work is if every nation on this planet agreed to tax the net. Otherwise, companies will simply flow to the net and avoid brick/mortor. Just look at Amazon.
Drop all tax breaks and subsidies. Then focus on simplifying the taxes.
I look forward to multiple rockets coming to private space. In addition, one of them (spaceX) is CHEAP to fly. The only thing that will beat it anytime soon will be the chinese since they will simply cheat and subsidize it (illegally, but china does not care about that).
Now, the problem is that CONgress continues trying to make NASA into a jobs bill. They had their CONstellation, and thankfully, it was killed. Now, we have SLS, as laid out by CONgress on HOW TO BUILD A ROCKET, TIMELINES, and MONEY. Yes, the same congress that can not balance a fucking budget, avoid wars, deal with illegals, deal with CHina, and YET, they think that they are able to design a rocket better than NASA.
Just fucking amazing.