Change-over to enewable energy

Super grids and energy security are incompatible.

The Russkies shut off gas to parts of Europe every winter. Why would anyone want to rely even more on power from unstable areas of the world?

And without super grids ithe idea is a bust. Most of Northern Europe was without wind last December. So 50% of energy gone in mid winter. Lots of fun.

Anyway there is plenty of shale gas out there who needs renewables?

What does this idiot think we'll do at night, or on cloudy winter days, when the wind decides to die down? He doesn't mention how storage would be accomplished. And of course part of his formula for making all this stuff work is "reducing demand", another way of saying it's uneconomic. Of course, he throws in a plan for wasting energy to produce hydrogen.

His math is silly. Why produce tiny amounts of energy from expensive wave and tidal sources? Just because it could maybe be done? The major output from wave-power sources is scrap metal.

He casually suggests that we'd need better weather forcasting!

Fact is, there is lots of natural gas underground, more than anybody imagined a few years ago. It's cheap and clean. Nuclear works, too, if governments let it.

IEEE Spectrum is junk.

Why don't you post on topic, about electronics? Even better, DO some electronics and post about that. You are trolling to find reasons to argue and insult people, and you only dare to do it around off-topic trash that can't be proven one way or another.

John

Super grids will have to reach halfway around the world to distribute solar power.

John

If you were paying more attention, you might have noted that the Desertec project envisages a super-grid coupling solar thermal plants in the Sahara to Germany. A shortage of wind over northern Europe could presumably be made up with electricity generated further south.

Anybody with enough sense to understand the scientific case for not burning much more fossil carbon. Not you, obviously.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

Current solar thermal plant design envisages keeping a reservoir of hot heat-transfer oil (or molten salt)to keep the generators running overnight. Odd that your creative insights missed that one.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

If you went to trouble of reading the article, you'd see that the "idiots" expect to use a big and very extensive super-grid to average out local variations in weather. The next generation of thermal solar power plants are supposed to store heat during the day - as hot oil or molten salt - so that they can sustain power generation over-night.

It may not be as cheap as burning fossil carbon is now, until you figure in the consequences of dumping even more CO2 into the atmosphere. And there is the point that the stocks of fossil carbon are finite, and we've extracted and burnt most of the stocks that were easy to dig up, and consequently cheap. Fossil carbon is going to get progressively more expensive, even before we get around to figuring in the eventual cost of dumping even more CO2 into the atmosphere.

An article in the IEEE Spectrum isn't electronics? John Larkin has a clearer idea of what constitutes "electronics" than the IEEE?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The concentrated solar power (CSP) at least makes some sense. Energy can also be stored in large water reservoirs. The downside is that CSP requires a lot of land and transportation over very large distances. In Europe this means relying on North-African countries for energy.

I've got news for you: all of the fossil fuel will get burned. Storing CO2 is a very bad idea. A CO2 storage facility is much more dangerous than a storage for nuclear waste. CO2 is a very toxic gas which will stay dangerous forever.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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I notice the article avoids any cost numbers including any cost numbers for CO2 going into the atmosphere.

3.8 million wind turbines. That ought to kill off a lot of birds. If two million were in the states. Nah, forget that. There isn't enough viable sites for two million windturbines in the U.S.

Dan

I've heard the concept. What's the efficiency of that? I keep hearing greenie-idiots saying "efficiency doesn't matter since sunlight is free!"

How's the Baxandall circuit coming along? Think you'll have it breadboarded by the end of the decade?

John

Why did you ask if you already knew the answer? ;-)

Even _I've_ posted some electronics stuff recently - I even got thanked for my suggestion of a mic preamp on .basics. :-)

Cheers! Rich

So, I take it you've never heard of forests?

Thanks, Rich

It's an IEEE Spectrum article, not the two peer-reviewed publications in "Energy Policy" on which the article is based.

There are other studies around that seem to support their point of view

Think of it as evolution in action.

n't

There should be room for a few off-shore, though.

Europe seems have about a thousand already.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The article is lunacy.

I'll admit I cba to look up exact figures, but the following costings should at least give a ballpark idea on the level of costs involved.

the projected total global power demand

If we said vaguely 10p/peak W, thats about =A31.9 trillion

If we said vaguely 2p per peak watt, that's =A30.6 billion

If we said vaguely 2p per peak watt, that's =A30.4 billion

t

If we said =A33000 per system, that's =A35.1 trillion

I've no idea on costs, but if theyre no cheaper than pv, 2p/peak watt =3D =A311 billion

e already in place, supplying 4 percent

If 0.8p per peak watt, that's =A32.8 billion

again if 2p/pk watt, =A310.8 billion

• 490 000 tidal turbines, 1 MW each, supplying 1 percent.

If 2p/pk watt, 9.8 billion.

So total generation install cost =3D ballpark =A32 trillion for all but the domestic PVs, plus 5 trillion for those. I dont know what the rest of the system plus administration costs are, but typically they at least double final end user cost, so say 2+2+5=3D =A39 trillion total.

That should wipe out the NHS budget, resulting in wholesale death.

I'm not claiming the figs are accurate, but hopefully near enough to give a rough idea of the kind of damage such an approach would do.

NT

They have fires! Prairies are worse! EVERYBODY PANIC!

-- Les Cargill

...

Probably not. Some of it is never going to be worth digging up, and a lot of it is going to become chemical feedstock for more making more interesting - and useful - moelcules than CO2.

Really? Oil fields have been doing it for millions of years

Spontaneous and unexpected CO2 releases have killed people.

This wasn't a CO2 storage facility, and it was lethal because Lake Nyos could release the CO2 dissolved in its waters very quickly.

Underground CO2 storage doesn't offer the same capacity for rapid release, and if you know it's down there you can check CO2 levels remotely and automatically, and warn people long before CO2 levels become dangerous.

It's not very toxic compared with - say CO or HCN. One of the anxieties about pumping it underground is whether it will react with olivine and similar silicates to turn them into carbonates, changing the volume of rock involved and posibly producing local fracturing, so it probably won't stay dangerous forever - unless you consider chalk to be a dangerous mineral.

Local fracturing may sound dangerous, but this is all going on several kilometers underground - if this happens we'll have years of advance warning.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

r...

It's probably not a very useful question. You need to have enough stored heat to keep the generators running overnight. If there's no phase change involved, a reservoir that stores twice as much heat as required will halve its temperature overnight, and you've got to pump twice as much water through at the end of the night as you did at sunset to generate the same power, and you've got twice the steam flow. It's going to be an interesting exercise optimising the size of the energy storage against the size of the pipe-work carrying the steam.

If you've got molten salt which you can allow to freeze, life gets a bit more complicated.

Or at least "too cheap to meter". Obviously efficiency matters, but only in the context of getting the maximum power out for the minimum capital investment and maintenance overhead.

Greenie idiots are quite as irritating as right-wing "there is no gloabla warming idiots". In either case, they are failing to think about what is - or will be - actually going on.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

..

Wrong.

Why not argue with the authors' serious publication?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

A forrest only stores a little bit of CO2.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------

No, that is CxHy aka fossil fuel.

And where do you want to send those people? Let me assure you that evacuating a large city (or urban area) is impossible.

OK, its less toxic than extremely toxic materials. But they're not planning to store those underground under extremely high pressures.

--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------