Tech That Will Save Our Species - Solar Thermal Power 648
NoMoreCoal writes "Salon has up a story by Joe Romm, former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, discussing a lesser-known alternative energy solution. It's a technology that (he claims) is ready to provide zero-carbon electric power big, fast, cheap and (most importantly) right now: solar thermal power. 'Improvements in manufacturing and design, along with the possibility of higher temperature operation, could easily bring the price down to 6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. CSP makes use of the most abundant and free fuel there is, sunlight, and key countries have a vast resource. Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States. Mexico has an equally enormous solar resource. China, India, southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Australia also have huge resources.'" Interesting stuff, even if he does mention the Archimedes Death Ray.
Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Informative)
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It's nice that people are thinking, but the problem is that the government tends to grant subsidies irresponsibly and pla
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to question why you think a 92 square mile station wouldn't be more useful. More reflective area = more power.
Should we wait for the 'right combination' to magically appear, or should we start doing what we can right now and learn what works and what doesn't? This tech is dead simple, it's scalable, and it taps a power source that won't exhaust itself for 5 billion years or so.
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When it comes to solar power - that's not just a valid assumption, it's practically a law of nature. Demand is highest du
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See? That's what kills me about people. Such short range thinkers.
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Eivind.
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The real problem with hydrogen is that it's an utter PITA to store (i.e., expensive) and fuel cells are, and for the forseable future will be, way too expensive compared to their power output (a few kilowatts costing you tens of thousands of dollars -- and lifespan is not unlimited). In other words, the capital costs will kill you every time. There's one proposal to use the supposed "hydrogen economy" and
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
When usage starts peaking there is no way to get the sun to send down more energy. A 92 square mile station wouldn't be any more useful than a much smaller station.
So that's like saying if you need more water then it wouldn't be any better to pull water out of the Mississippi with a bucket than a cup because you can't make the river flow any faster?
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Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, with solar thermal, you can store surplus heat. Plus there's the nice coincidence that in warm climates energy usage tracks insolation (e.g. airco).
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
The sun costs $0, so even if the best thing you can do is sell the generated power at $0.00001/kWh to a place 500 miles away you make a profit.
One way to use up excess energy is to pump water upstream above a hydroelectric power station. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity [wikipedia.org]
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
I would love to see $600 billion poured into alternative fuels. It would be a boon to our economy, it would be a great opportunity for scientists and engineers, and it would isolate us from oil politics. Not to mention that it is an ethical thing to do, if we care about our planet.
Oh noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
So this unlimited and completely pollution free* power source can only completely provide for the base load of the entire country (if you make zero attempt to solve the problem)? Oh, how terrible!
Nobody pushing for alternative energy is really that attached to the idea of a "complete" solution. It's the nay-sayers who are always harping on any particular weakness of any one technique and saying "well it can't do everything, what's the point?"
It's nice that people are thinking, but the problem is that the government tends to grant subsidies irresponsibly and places too much importance on any one system. The media plays up the importance of biofuels or wind power, then government pork follows and sends science off on a tangent following a single system.
No the problem is that people naturally stick to the status quo unless whatever the new thing is a "complete solution", so it often takes the government, for better or worse, to get people out of their comfort zone. In some cases, for better, like wind power, which is a fantastic source of power in many places (like west Texas where the farms are going up all the time), and is providing an increasing percentage of electricity, without trying to be a "complete solution". This is exactly what you seem to be asking for -- diversity, using appropriate tech where appropriate -- but it's an example of government pork gone bad?
Not that I believe most of them are subsidized; it's apparently fairly profitable to own a wind farm even without government help.
The money should instead be going into research on how to find the best balance of technology.
That makes no sense. The money required to 1) develop alternative energy sources and 2) do the feasibility studies on where and how they can be deployed and 3) actually build them, is vastly more than the amount of money required to take all those feasibility studies that have already been done and decide which tech to deploy where. "finding the best balance of technology" is pointless if you haven't spent the money to develop the tech, no?
We are going to have use coal for a long time, that's inescapable. There is no one solution that is capable of completely supplanting coal. It's going to require efforts in lots of fields like nuclear, geothermal, and solar. Each has its own characteristics, advantages, and draw backs. It's all about finding the right combination.
Coal is not inescapable, it's not the perfect fuel with no drawbacks in theory, it is itself not a "complete solution" in practice. If you're going to put nuclear on the table, then there's your opportunity to completely replace coal right there.
* In operation of course, not during manufacture, but seriously who cares? Our entire society is built on manufacturing, with the commensurate pollution. If they didn't build thermal solar plants, it's not like nothing else would be built. The comparatively minuscule environmental cost of building the plants is just noise compared to the benefits of running them pollution-free for years.
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Yes there is, and it's been done. I point to France and it's nuclear power. The swiss use 0% coal too by using a mix of hydro and nuclear.
Geothermal (in places where it would work, like Australia) also could replace 100% all coal fired power plants.
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:4, Informative)
The standard plans for buildign Solar Thermal generators include heat storage devices. More importantly, in the areas where these devices are created, what almost ALWAYS happens is that during periods of peak demand, the power output is highest. I.E. During 9-5, when businesses are up and running and air conditioners are up and running , the sun is the strongest.
Then they actually STORE up heat during the peak demand periods, to use in the lower demand period, called night.
Using current technology, solar thermal power plants are almost cheap enough to displace fossil fuels, at least for the southern half of the country.
I would agree that nuclear is probably going to be neccessary for the parts of the country that don't get enough sun. But geothermal is WAY too expensive, except in extremely rare locations.
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Well you're half-right. Photovoltaics can't run overnight without storage, and that alone disqualifies them as baseload in the vast majority of cases. However, in many locations, peak power production from PV tracks peak demand pretty well, so PV's ideal use
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Buffer it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will. Thus, within the limits of ecology, it actually makes an excellent load balancing system - run at full power when power is needed, drop it down to a trickle and let the coal/nuclear plants take the load when it's not needed.
Solar shouldn't be too bad, but most current systems can vary quite widely simply with passing clouds.
One interestin
Re:Solar thermal power/solar photovoltaics (Score:5, Insightful)
That, as I understand it, is one of the advantages of thermal solar over photovoltaic and wind.... the heat stored in the molten salt acts as a buffer (a giant thermal flywheel, if you will), so that if the sun goes behind a cloud for a few minutes (or even a few hours), the plant's energy output doesn't immediately drop. Indeed, that's how the thermal solar plants are able to reliably generate power even during that regular solar outage we call 'night'. Combine that with the cost advantages (no expensive silicon required, just glass and concrete!) and I'd bet your UK tech guy would be a good deal more comfortable with thermal solar than he is with PV.
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Just straight using the fissionable materials we currently have access to on earth along with current fuel reprocessing technologies gives us ten thousand years easily.
I'm all for building a space elevator and mining asteroids, but if we decide to solve our energy problems with nuclear fission we can just start building the plants tomorrow.
92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats somewhere between the size of New Jersey and New Hampshire.
Talk about pie in the sky... its more realistic to be talking about microwave power stations in orbit!
Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:4, Insightful)
~S
pie in the sky (Score:2, Interesting)
1) How much toxic materials will be required to create and maintain a 92-by-92-mile square grid. 92 *MILES*, people. like parent said, the size of New Jersey.
2) For you environmentalist types who can't tolerate the thought of drilling for oil off the coast, what do you think a 92 square mile solar blanket will do to the native wildlife?
3) How will this power be transmitted to consumers? Voltage loss is a real issue for long-distance transmission.
Why
Re:pie in the sky (Score:5, Funny)
Re:pie in the sky (Score:4, Informative)
2) No doubt it would change the local environment, but considering it's currently desert the change would probably improve conditions for local wildlife. Add shade, decrease ground temperatures, maybe even help retain moisture in the soil.
3) High voltage DC transmission can send electricity thousands of miles while maintaining acceptable losses. About 5% per 1000 miles. You can't do it with AC because such long cables have huge capacitance that makes reversing the voltage 60 times per second rather difficult. Also, there's less issues with synching the AC waveform with whoever it's connected to - local inverters do that.
2) Waste is still an issue, since the USA is scared shitless to reprocess nuclear waste (it's actually illegal in this country thanks to anti-proliferation legislation).
=Smidge=
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Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Using Wiki, New Jersey is 70 miles wide by 110 miles long while New Hampshire is 68 miles wide by 190 miles long.
On a side note, instead of locating the power source in one state, spread it out over southern California (they need all the energy they can get), Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and maybe Florida (hurricanes might pose an issue).
Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means we shouldn't even try to build 1 plant.
Cause its hard and stuff.
Current Power Gen Acreage estimates... (Score:3, Informative)
Current solar acreage is probably small. A very large solar plant takes
http://www.metaefficient.com/news/north-americas-largest-solar-electric-plant-in-switched-on.html [metaefficient.com]
http://www.metric-conversions.org/cgi-bin/util/convert.cgi [metric-conversions.org]
Electric Plant
It looks like electric plants maybe about 75 acres to 170 acres.
(various google "electric plant acres" results.
Say 125 acres average.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/ipp/ipp_sum.html [doe.gov]
350mw per plant
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Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats somewhere between the size of New Jersey and New Hampshire.
Talk about pie in the sky... its more realistic to be talking about microwave power stations in orbit!
Yeah, and guess what the square mileage of farmland in the U.S. is? Hint: Hell of a lot more than New Jersey and New Hampshire combined.
So land-based farming is "pie in the sky", and we might as well talk about orbital hydroponics labs?
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. We've paved over many times more than that amount of land to make our highways and Wal-Mart parking lots, a lot of it requiring dynamiting of mountains first; how exactly is it impossible to put up some mirrors on the ground? If you're imagining a contiguous 92x92 mile area, maybe that's why you're stumbling, not that it's actually any more infeasible, it's just not how it would be done.
Re:92x92 square miles? Jeez, lets get on it. (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, that's less than 2% of Utah, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. Any one of those states has sufficient unused desert to accommodate 8500 square miles of solar plants, and it wouldn't make sense to put all of the plants in one place anyway.
Assuming each plant can generate sufficient power to be worth building, there's no problem with finding room. Environmental impact might be an issue, but you also have to factor out the environmental damage done by the current coal plants.
92 square miles? (Score:2)
That little line there makes me ask, "well, if I keep on burning coal, just how warm would the planet really get..."
That's nice... (Score:2)
... now if only we could do something about the over population...
Environmental impact of the most literal kind (Score:2)
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What happens when we suck the heat out of a 8,464 square mile area in the southwest?
You're kidding, right?
Right now the sunlight hits the dirt, is partly absorbed and reradiated, and partly reflected.
In the proposed system, the sunlight hits a mirror, is mostly reflected to a collector, at which point it is mostly absorbed and reradiated, and partly reflected.
There will be a potentially significant local effect, and a probably mostly insignificant larger effect. The speed at which the heat is reradiated may be a little different.
92-by-92? Impractical. (Score:2)
Solar thermal is a nice thought. It might even work for some states. But it's not the One Magic Bullet that people seem to be seeking.
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I heard about this on NPR last week, and this same concern was brought up. No one is saying that they are going to make such a huge array (can you imagine the need for maintenance workers?). However, if there are enough arrays created, it can be the functional equivalent of the
Heat to turbine or Stirling Engine? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can anybody shed some light on this? (no pun intended)
Re:Heat to turbine or Stirling Engine? (Score:5, Interesting)
A second Manhattan Project (Score:5, Insightful)
For some this may be true, for some it certainly is not. But to know which tech belongs to which category, a serios research investment needs to happen.
Now imaginge that a country of the size of the United States would invest just the cost of 1 month worth of Iraq war into the development of alternative energys. A research facility town in a desert, funded with anything they need to prove whatever technology promises to deliver clean energy on a larger scale, and invest what is necessary to solve the problem, or dismiss the technology, could probably do more for the world climate and world economy than most other measures.
The Manhattan project was an example of an must-do project where absolutely anything needed to solve a complex technical problem was done, investing any manpower and money possibly needed to solve the task.
Now think of doing the same, but this time not to build the most destructive weapon on the planet, but to get rid of oil as the primary energy source, lose the handcuffs of oil dependency, and save the climate.
Other uses of Solar Thermal Power (Score:4, Interesting)
Transmission lines (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that transmission lines to move the power cost about $300,000 a mile, plus the cost of substations and transformers. It's not a stretch of the imagination to say that such an upgrade to the system would cost trillions of dollars.
Economics say that the closer power is produced to where it is consumed, the cheaper it actually is. Which is why covering New Mexico with these is a ludicrous proposition and not worth investigating. I'm wondering if it'll work in the Chicagoland metropolitan area first and foremost, and if the costs work out for such a plant to be built.
ausra (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the stuff at their website, http://ausra.com/ [ausra.com], they answer a lot of the questions that have been, and doubtless will be asked here;
It's possible to store thermal energy and use it to produce electricity at night.
Some places do receive more sunlight than others, and plants built in those places would be more efficient.
They have a nice PDF that shows (among other things) the normal solar radiation for different areas - plants work better in deserts than in river valleys, but there are plenty of places you can build them that are cost effective.
Ausra isn't vaporware - they already build a plant in Australia, and they are building one in southern California.
The current plant is cost competitive with scrubbed coal, and future plants are supposed to be on par with unscrubbed coal plants.
That last may be hype, but at the very least they can already produce electricity for less than 12 cents a kilowatt, and cutting that in half doesn't seem unreasonable.
Even so, at best these kinds of plants will only supplant oil and coal burning electric plants.
We're still going to burn oil in our cars, home heaters, etc.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Ausra, but most of my information about them comes from them, or their press releases, so take it with a grain of salt.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Riiiiiiight (Score:3, Insightful)
For comparison Yellow National park is "only" 3472sq miles.
So by undertaking the largest construction project ever and cover over that much area we can power the US with concentrated solar power.
I can only imagine the environmental impact statement required for such a project.
What's the backup plan for the cloudy days? Tucson,AZ has about 89 of them per year. Lots of local backup required.
All that power generation in one area creates a transmission problem as well.
I'd rather see a Pebble Bed Reactors or some other relatively clean nuclear power with plants spread around the the country.
Here's another thought with centralized power, centralized damage could take the whole thing off line. A ripe target prior to an invasion/attack or just to make us spend the money to build it again. Nope, while I'm not opposed to solar power, this massive project is just plain stupid.
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Also, these wouldn't have to be regulated to just the south west. The could be built across the entire southern US. The sunlight doesn't shine any brighter in the deserts. It's simply choice land for this kind of project because of the relatively low cost of land. Building this in downtown San Antonio doesn't make sense. But areas between San Antonio and Brownsville are probably
I am disturbed to discover (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently a crazy sect of cultists called "scientists" (who I believe live in California and are led by Tom Cruise) are contradicting the knowledgeable and sagely hippies and spreading lies about how nuclear power is actually safe when done right, and waste can be stored safely at Yucca mountain for some 10,000 years. Furthermore, they suggest that spent nuclear fuel can be reprocessed so that it will have a significantly shorter half life, on the order of a few hundred years. I think we can safely ignore these crackpots, with their "Phd's" and other cultish paraphernalia, and listen to my friend Zed who works at greenpeace.
These same crazy scientists in an effort to derail solar panel have pointed out some problems with Zed's plans to save the world. Before we can deploy solar power plants of any size, we must address these obstacles. I am not familiar with them myself, as I don't get outside much, but I read about them on wikipedia. They are called:
1. Night time.
2. Clouds.
"Night time", judging by it's title, seems to be some kind of dark temporal force preventing the rays of the sun or "Sol" from reaching the earth. I suspect this does not exist, it even sounds like something out of a science fiction story. If it does exist, I am confident that if we set our best space/time physicists to work on it, we can eradicate this shadowy nemesis.
I'm not sure what clouds are, but according to wikipedia they are "a visible mass of droplets or frozen crystals floating in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body."
I don't know about you, but this sounds like an unlikely scenario to me. I mean, water "floating in the atmosphere." Water doesn't float in the atmosphere! It stays securely packed in mountain dew bottles. I'm sure we can ignore these hypothetical "cloud" problems when building our solar panels, and they will not cause any problems.
In any case, let's ignore these so called "logistical problems" (a term that sounds like cult speak to me!) and deploy solar power globally. Zed assures me that the primary problems facing global power right now is a lack of positive thinking.
Some issues I have with this topic. (Score:4, Informative)
Before I get into that though, I want to briefly discuss how power is produced today, since there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about how things seem to work.
Power utilities today have quite a few resources to generate power. The "base load" power that everyone seems to talk about these days comes from large generation units that maintain a continuous, rated power level 24/7. The reasons for this are usually economical, but can also be based out of safety concerns for things like nuclear power. Depending on the area, the remaining power is usually generated with generation units that are committed a few days in advance (although it is possible to get a generator started from a cold start in 1-2 hours) All generators have ramp rates (the maximum amount the power can change during a given period of time), so they are unable to change their power outputs instantly. In cases where the load demanded by the consumer starts to creep above that being generated by the power plants, peaking stations (normally natural gas based) can come online and are able to respond to the load change. Natural gas, while effective at being able to keep the power generation and load in balance, is expensive, so peaking plants normally don't operate unless power prices are high or it is necessary to use them.
If the load drops for any reason, power plants are capable of throttling down their power generation (again, subject to ramp rates) to approximately 10-20% of their rated output. Anything less than this and the unit will be forced offline (because a minimum level of stream production is necessary to turn the turbine, etc) Although this is one method of regulating power, generation units have a cost curve. The rated power is where the cost of generation is a minimum. Above and below that point, cost starts to rise, sometimes dramatically.
Alternative resources like wind are used, but not heavily due to the nature of their power production. With modern forecasting techniques, operators are able to predict fairly accurately what wind patterns will be doing 3-5 hours in advance. The major problem occurs when the wind stops blowing. Even though we know 3-5 hours in advance that we need to generate more power, it takes a lot of effort (and money) to commit a bunch of generators to make up the shortage on such short notice. Because of this, wind power tends to only make up a small percentage of total power - so only one or two generators need to come up to make up for any shortfall.
So what does this have to do with the current topic you ask? What the article seems to suggest is replacing the multitude of fossil fuel based generators with a few solar power generators. While this may look good on the surface, in reality there are many problems.
The first thing that comes to mind is reliability. People take for granted just how reliable the North American power grid is. In many countries of the world (such as India), power producers cannot meet demand and must make sacrifices to various areas (usually rural) to keep the load balanced. For most modern generators, it's not unreasonable to assume a 1-2% outage rate a year. With multiple smaller generation facilities, this isn't much of a problem, since it is easy to make up the shortage by bringing another generator online. Normally, the system has "reserve power" in the form of generators that are online but not producing power. These generators must be able to start producing power in 15 minutes or less. So, if a generator fails, another generator will be brought up in its place and within an hour should be producing the full amount of required power. In the ev
Re:so in other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This comment not directed at parent - it's to the world in general: Just shut up and do it already!
If it works so well, why aren't you already paying $0 for your energy bills?!? Here: BUY SOME! [mrsolar.com] Install them, and then (and only then), come back to slashdot and tell us how well they work, and how you don't pay anything for electricity anymore!
I understand our concern about the larger issue of how "everyone else" gets their energy. The discussion about large-scale renewable energy sources is an important and worthy conversation. But what better way to further that goal than to be an example of how this can succeed by just doing it for yourself?
I'm going to price out some solar panels for my house and see if I can make this work right now. In fact, if it *does* work out, maybe I'll look into buying a patch of land and installing a bunch of solar panels and selling the energy. But here's my concern: I'm not the first person to have thought of this. And solar panels aren't exactly a new invention. So why don't we see a bunch of little, private wind and/or solar energy farms? Is it because it doesn't work on a small scale, but does work on a larger scale? I don't buy that - the relationship between the amount of energy collected and the most significant resource that solar energy collection requires (land) is perfectly linear: One 10x10 solar panel optimally collects x KW/h of energy. y 10x10 solar panels optimally collect x*y KW/h of energy. If it's going to work on a large scale, it *must* necessarily also work on all smaller scales.
Like I said, I'm going to look into doing it for myself, but my suspicion is that the reason we're not all already doing this is because it just doesn't work.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple notes (I don't know if these are California specific or not): You are not allowed to install solar panels that would generate significantly more than 100% of your average usage. I don't think the state wants everyone to turn their own houses into little power-plants.
Also, for those interested... You only pay a power bill once at the end of the year.
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Re:Why do you think that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trillion? no, not even close. (Score:3, Informative)
It is actually pretty simple to build, doesn't require any new materials, and is simple to maintain.
"More if you factor in the need to store energy overnight and on overcast days."
It's not battery storage, it's hot liquid storage in tanks. Which is released into the turbines on demand.
An area the size of a football field will produce 300 MWatts at the beginning. Cloudy days don't impact this things as much as you would think.
This is NOT solar panels.
About 5 month
Re:Why do you think that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation, please. Else, don't cite figures.
Citation, please. Certainly the article cited in the OP didn't make such claims. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you'll be a whole lot more convincing if you'd provide some citations.
In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the cost of the war at $500 billion. That was three years ago. Others put the cost at $1 to $2 trillion in 2006. See this article [guardian.co.uk] from The Guardian (UK) for details. If you would like to provide some citations refuting these figures, please do so.
And your basis for this claim is...what, exactly?
From the article cited in the OP, "Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours." That covers overnight hours. You'd locate the facilities in areas that typically don't have extended periods of overcast days (e.g., US Southwest, as mentioned in the article). Neither will provide 100% coverage, and so you'll probably still need existing power generation facilities, but they can be scaled back in operation the vast majority of time. What isn't discussed and probably needs to be is whether it is more effective to keep those facilities operating at bare minimum levels vs. come up with some other means to deal with extended poor generation periods.
First, the reference to the 92x92 mile grid says "Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest..." You might note that "plants" is plural. So we're not talking a single 92x92 mile plant, but a large number of plants that cover an equivalent area. However, it's unclear how large an individual plant in this scheme would be vis a vis the ones in operation today.
Re:Why do you think that? (Score:4, Interesting)
In comparison, the wikipedia article on thermal solar plants claims that most plant designs aim to achieve $1 per kWh/year (that makes the installed cost about $10/watt). Using the $10 figure, you get an installed cost 30 trillion dollars.
"First, the reference to the 92x92 mile grid says "Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest..." You might note that "plants" is plural. So we're not talking a single 92x92 mile plant, but a large number of plants that cover an equivalent area. However, it's unclear how large an individual plant in this scheme would be vis a vis the ones in operation today."
I was refering to the 3 gigawat plant metioned in the article. the largest they've proposed building was around 100 mw. Is it really possile to build one thirty times larger? I have never seen a design that big.
"Others put the cost at $1 to $2 trillion"
That's because they are conuting secondary effects, like health care and disability. That is hand waving. I could make wild claims about the oppurtunity costs associated with solar too (there's a lot you could accomplish with that $30 trillion, and what about the environmental effects? that aluminum has to come from somewhere), but you don't see me making up numbers and adding them to my cost to make it more compelling. I will stick with the congressional budget, thank you very much.
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640 acres per square mile and the Nevada plant is 275 acres, so that's 2.3272 plants per square mile.
So we need 2.3272x8464=19698 of those plants, just like the original post said.
This article says the Nevada One plant cost $250 million to build: http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/7150 [technologynewsdaily.com]
$250 million times 19,698 gives just under $5 trillion dollars in construction costs. Now at some point economies of scale will kick in and save us money, an
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HTH.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's quite interesting that a lot of the poorer, indeed third world [LOL - Australia ;-)], countries of today could be the power suppliers of tomorrow. Of course that will depend to a large degree on them stopping killing each other long enough to allow the current rich nations to come in and setup the plants!
The problem then becomes one of supply - how do you get the Solar Thermal riches of the Sahara up to Europe without massive power losses. There was a Chinese scientist 5 or 10 years ago who put forward an idea for a "Super Grid" to allow us to move power around the globe more efficiently. Maybe this needs a bit more thought!
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Interesting)
When solar power can be stored and transported similarly at competitive costs to world oil distribution markets, the solar energy market will be ready. The market certainly won't be ready, won't be competitive, if you are building "super grids". That's nothing more than a massively economically inefficient subsidy (payoff) to politically connected constituents (just like ethanol farmers and processing plants).
Re:And a related problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you can just store the energy in batteries, and use them at night.
Re:And a related problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And a related problem... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:And a related problem... (Score:5, Informative)
Read up on power losses on high power transmission lines and superconductors; then you'll understand how they make sense in limited installations.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Show some courtesy.
d
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Before criticizing that type of technology, you really should read the article, you know. You might learn a thing or two.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
NS solar tech is much cheaper than current solar tech- As in 50k->30k for putting solar power in your 2000sq' house (45 year vs 25 year payoff-- but that assumes no more inflation-- with historical inflation more like 22 vs 12 year payoff).
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is not the magic bullet you seem to think it is. There's still a few major issues I see with nuclear:
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
I know that other countries have made nuclear work (France is the most cited example.) However, those countries have been able to regulate the plants more closely without conservatives jumping all over their governments for 'promoting socialism' and 'over-regulation'. Our plants are (and would be) operated by for-profit companies. More corners being cut = more profit, so you better believe they'll cut those corners.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Argument by fear. In the entire history of civilian nuclear power in the US there has been one major accident which didn't kill anyone, this is far better than virtually every other industry in the country. If you were to apply the same irrational argument to other parts of the infrastructure society would grind to a halt.
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure ( such as a train station or airport ). Furthermore if terrorist attacks are an issue then a few nuclear power plants are relatively easy to guard and difficult to attack. It is also unlikely a terrorist organization that had the ability to launch a sufficiently fierce attack would pick a nuclear power plant as a target since there are far more vulnerable sites available.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity.
I agree the nuclear waste problem is largely artificial. Between breeder reactors and processing solutions, nuclear waste is a largely overblown concern.
Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Let's stay mostly on topic here. The coming generation of cheap photovoltaic cells does not make use of much in the way of toxic chemicals that cannot be recycled. The molten salts proposed by posters here are not waste products at all, but reusable parts of the system and easily recycled into another such. They are a non issue.
Argument by fear.
The formal name of th
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Yes, but it's easy to store pebbles (they're sealed in graphite, waterproof, and can just be loaded into barrels and put underground. They're also rather small (the size of a tennis ball).
2. Pebble Bed reactors can't melt down. If they get too hot, they generate less heat, resulting in an abandoned reaction stabilising long before thermal damage can occur in the containment
3. Ignorance will always be a problem
4. Hardly. The level of security at nuclear power plants is ridiculously off the scale. Also, with pebble bed reactors, the pebbles are practically useless for making weapons.
Pebble bed reactors seem to be the way forward. I suggest reading about them to see their benefits. It's interesting stuff.
Pebble Bed reactors are retarded (Score:3, Interesting)
Pebble bed reactors certinally can melt down. It is all a question of design. The vast majority of all reactor designs employ a negative temperature coefficient of reacitvity to achieve stability. That means that as the core gets hotter, the rate of reaction decreases. This is even true of plain old light water react
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with this plan is that it doesn't scale out. It's subject to the Windmill effect, where it's contesting with other uses for land, and eventually, it will be a source of clutter on the landscape.
Huh? What other uses are there for large areas of desert? I recently heard about a scheme in Egypt where they intend that the shade below the mirrors will allow for agriculture in the desert, perhaps with water from solar-powered desalination plants.
Solar is a near perfect power source requiring minimal systems to exploit it, totally renewable and producing no waste. The fact that people in countries with year-round sunshine are heating their water with gas or electricity is ridiculous. The oil and gas peo
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for these big mirrors, deserts have plenty of empty space, and could probably use a bit if shade. In inhabited areas this is going to be a bigger problem. There, solar cells are probably easier: simply cover every roof with them, and you've got plenty of energy without sacrifing any space.
Turns out wikipedia even has a page about solar shingles [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That isn't really a significant concern. There's plenty of empty, sun-drenched space in the desert that nobody wants to use for anything else.
Space-based solar, on the other hand, suffers from a much bigger problem: the cost of launching material into orbit is so outrageously high that space-based solar
What exactly is your point? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? There are places on earth that have no access to the sun? Where?
Second, even if it's not a suitable way of generating power EVERYWHERE, who cares? It's renewable and non-carbon emitting, and anything that reduces emissions is a good thing. And for places where it is suitable, the excess power can be sold to other places.
Re:What exactly is your point? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What exactly is your point? (Score:5, Funny)
Your mom's basement.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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No, it doesn't.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Begging the question" is to ask a question which only makes sense to ask after certain other questions have been answered. The classic example is, "have you stopped beating your wife?" You cannot expect a meaningful answer to that question unless you have established that the person being asked has, at some time in the past, beat his wife. It's not valid to ask the first question until the second has been dealt with.
In this case, the argument is that plants such as this could produce a given amount of energy does not beg the question of the resources needed to create or maintain them. It leads to that question, but does not beg that question. If we were, on the other hand, to ask the questions in reverse order, we would be begging the question. It makes no sense to consider asking how many of our current resources will will apply to these plants until we have answered how many of our current resources these plants will replace.
Furthermore, "How much of our current resources will it take to create/maintain these plants?" is a kind of catch-all question. You aren't saying, "Well this stuff requires a million kilos of unobtainium per watt produced, wouldn't that be more expensive than oil over the next twenty years?" That would be a valid question.
Asked generically, your question amount to this:Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper just to go on as we have indefinitely? This indeeds begs a question, namely, which is can we?
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
When they say '6 to 8 cents per KWh', it generally covers construction, O&M costs. Resources generally abstract out to dollar costs.
Basically, they generally assume you get a loan with a payoff duration of the expected lifespan of the plant. Say 20 years. They figure O&M will cost so much per year, and so many KWh will be produced. Simple division gives you O&M cost per KWh. Then
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Show me some working, power-producing fusion and/or antimatter power plants.
I'll show you some working, power-producing solar-thermal power plants.
Geez. Heating water with solar power really isn't rocket science. The improvements proposed for these power
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The big difference of course, is that there are commercially operating solar/thermal power plants running - with a cost of ~15cents/KWh. Nobody has an operating fusion plant dumping electricity into the grid - dito with antimatter.
Given that the existing plants are experimental, it is entirely possible that future
Re:What about storage and transmission? (Score:5, Informative)
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid
There are some pictures of the German plant here [google.co.uk].