Solar PV comparable to gas fired power stations

Ooops. Just testing to see if anyone is awake. Dinorwig manages nearly 1.6GW and is 12s to full load.

Regards, Martin Brown

There was a headline in the late 1950s "ZETA! free power from the sea". I still have a reference to it in a book from the time.

This was ZETA

And we might well have had controlled fusion by now if all the money had not been poured into Tokamak

--
Dirk

http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book - Magick and Technology

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Well then, let's pump gold. It's denser, and it saves money. ;-)

-- Cheers, James

. snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:

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It just takes a puddle...

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Your idea of what's reasonable isn't universally shared.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Keeping it warm enough to flow is a problem. Liquid tungsten is slightly denser, but much harder to melt. Platinum is appreciably denser - 19.77 gm/cc - and while it melts at 1763.3C, which is higher than you'd need for gold - 1064.18C - it is cooler than you'd need for tungsten.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Some people have been known to pump air into underground caverns to store energy, and let it expand again when they need the power. Nuclear explosives are a neat way of making underground caverns if you don't actually want to get into them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

and overlook the fact that ALL the energy used to putt a Prius around still comes from petrol ....

(snips)

Yep, 1333W * 5 hours (I usually allow six) =6667Whr. Averaged over 24 hours, allows you about 277 Watts average. Doesn't go far.

As in, do it at work?

The Snowy Mountains (Hydro) Scheme in Australia has been using nocturnal pumping to storage lakes since the 1960's, as a means of peak-lopping. Links are almost impossible to find, almost everything on the scheme nowadays is about the actual hydro generation or irrigation aspects. One pumping station I visited there in 1969 had a

25,000 HP pump motor (IIRC there were ore than the one) which used a *small* pony motor to spin it up to speed under no-flow conditions, a mere 1000HP itself.

The importance of hydro for peak lopping cannot be over-estimated, as its availability and cost are unrelated to time of day.

--
Nonsense.

Take the "ding" post, where you declared that an inductor, at the
frequency required, could have a Q of 200 or so and was readily
available?

Cite a source.

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ar so

After re-reading the thing critically, I guess they really mean 500 suns' concentration, or about 60W / cm^2.

Actually, I jumped on it. I put him off the idea, killing a few 'green' pseudo-jobs but hopefully saving the taxpayers a buck or two. T'was the least I could do.

Ayn Rand thought the same. But, engineers running the world? Too many can't balance their equipment budgets. A.R. was kind of an ing=E9nue.

Some sort of merit-testing to weed out the rot would be good. Oh yeah, we have that. The standards must suck.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I have no idea what post you are referring to. It sounds like you've been brooding over this for years. Obsession for sure.

But you have snipped all the good stuff and dredged this up.

John

Women are great but they don't ski fast. Usually.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Some do. Some really do.

The Brat can almost keep up with me. One of these days she'll be faster.

John

Excellent.

Not unless you slow down. Density's too low for lasses. High surface- to-weight ratio too.

Cheers, James

It also degrades gradually in adverse conditions, and the occurence of doubling is (I believe) usually obvious, and can be immediately addressed.

One can imagine more complex schemes that would eliminate doubling, but more complex systems can just die suddenly and completely - just what you don't want in ATC.

Sylvia.

Yes, but I think that claims was made by scientists who did not understand economics, and thought that operating cost was all that mattered.

Sylvia.

Ach! I seem to be missing posts again.

For this to make economic sense, solar power has to cost less than the

*operating cost* for gas powered stations, so that you install a solar power system because its capital cost is more than offset by the reduction in fuel, wear and maintenance of the gas plant.

Solar power would have to be *very* cheap for that to work.

Sylvia.