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What do you think the cost would be Mr. Sloman, and the implications of spending it?

NT

On a power plant scale, see APS' solar facility. ...Jim Thompson

--
                  [On the Road, in New York]

| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

So, you've NEVER had to run the A/C after the sun goes down?

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

A company is adding another 300 acres to a solar facility in Lake County, Florida. It's currently 100 acres.

--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

..

ead:

yes, global warming will cost us all money one way or another. But what it would take to avoid it, if thats even possible, would cost us enormously more. That is the massivest flaw of the whole green agenda

NT

maybe, if its thermally powered ac, not if electrical. But really ac should be the last port of call after passive measures have been taken, not the first port of call.

NT

That is a meaningless claim since you don't know how much CO2 managed to get out.

The system will probably be designed not to leak fast just like nuclear reactors are designed to shut down in case of problem. Or rocket engines which are designed to always fire as expected. We all know how well that works out in reality.

Besides that, underground CO2 storage is a very bad idea because it doesn't solve a problem. Basic rule: if something isn't part of the solution it is a part of the problem. At some point the CO2 has to be taken out for some reason and at that time it will pose a bigger problem then than the CO2 is now. Its always like that when stuff is put into the ground to 'get rid of it'. Just look at the impact and costs of cleaning up chemical waste dumps. What seems like an easy way out often is a one way into trouble.

Worst, in a couple of centennia the area in NL where the CO2 dumps are planned will probably be covered by sea or ice. How about maintenance

-if people didn't forgot about the underground time bombs-?

In the event of a toxic gas spill you don't have days. Remember Bhopal? Did you ever thought about why they tell people to close doors and windows when the air-raid alarm goes off? Its because there is no capacity to evacuate people in the event of a toxic gas spill.

5% is not much. Given the fact that CO2 is heavier than air makes it even worse because it forms a blanked near the ground.

Again: that is a meaningless claim since you don't know how much CO2 managed to get out. The fact it stayed there is just dumb luck. Its there neither by design and neither by choice.

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

Whose website is now dark.

The APS Springerville site NEVER produced any sellable electricity. All it did was PARTIALLY run some water pumps some of the time on the adjacent coal fired plant.

Not one net watthour of pv solar energy has ever been produced.

pv solar at present remains a gasoline destroying net energy sink. It is not in any manner renewable or sustainable and still has a horrendous carbon footprint.

Detailed analysis at <

>

Renewability and sustainability (and the required net energy ) can reasonably be expected a decade after the panel price drops under twenty five cents per peak watt.

Present pricing is TEN TIMES what is required.

The average home synchronous inverter consumes the value of 150% of the electricity sent through it.

--
Many thanks,

Don Lancaster                          voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics   3860 West First Street   Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml   email: don@tinaja.com

Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

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Scarcely. If there's still 8% left after a few hundred million years, it hasn't been getting out fast, which is what would be required to create a Lake Nyos situation.

Both of which involve managing energetic energy-producing reactions. CO2 in porous layers of rock doesn't have a lot of spare energy to invest in makig life complicated for design engineers. This is argument by false analogy.

The CO2 that has been buried in some natural gas fields has been there for hundrends of millions of years. We don't have to keep our CO2 buried for anything like that long - CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere by the natural process of weathering olivine - and other silicate rocks - to carbonates. In fact there is a plausible proposal to reverse anthropogenic global warming by milling a lot of olivine and spreading it on surf beaches around the world.

In the long term, these carbonates end up on the sea-floor, get subducted into the earths crust and get hot enough to release the CO2 again - it eventually comes back out of volcanoes - but there's a great deal of CO2 in transit, and we wouldn't be adding much.

It's one of the ways that nature has been dealing with the problem over the past billion years or so, and the analogy with Love Canal is utterly misleading.

Natural gas fields have been underground time bombs? You are letting your imagination run away with you.

"During the night of December 2=963, 1984, water entered a tank containing 42 tons of MIC. The resulting exothermic reaction increased the temperature inside the tank to over 200 =B0C (392 =B0F) and raised the pressure. The tank vented releasing toxic gases into the atmosphere. The gases were blown by northwesterly winds over Bhopal."

The tank of methyl isocyanate was on the surface, not several miles underground, on the other side of a layer of rock that had been impervious to natural gas for several hundred millions of years. Again this is an utterly false analogy.

From tanks of chemicals on the surface, not buried a few miles underground. Do try to get some kind of feel for the nature of the gas storage we are actually talking about, rather than making false analogies with very different situations.

so

l 5% in open air is an enormous mass of gas. If the "dense" gas cloud over Bhopal was roughly a cubic kilometre if gas, the 40 tons of methyl isocynate would have represented some 40 ppm contamination. Methyl isocynate really is a very toxic gas and concentrations as low as 10 ppm can be lethal. You'd have needed a thousand times more CO2 to create anything like the same effect.

Only on a windless day.

Nobody "designed" the CO2 content into some natural gas fields, The fact that there was some 8% left after a few hundred millions years does suggest that the leakage rate is very low indeed - a great deal lower than anything that could worry us. If you weren't quite so dedicated to being a "not in my back yard" alarmist, you might be in a position to appreciate this.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Think about the Younger Dryas, which was a hiccup in the thawing process that ended the last Ice Age

Basically, the Gulf Stream turned off for 1300 years, probably due to massive amounts of fresh water being dumped in the North Atlantic when the Laurentian ice sheet slid off into the ocean. The Greenland ice sheet isn't as big, and doesn't show any immediate signs of sliding off into the ocean as a single lump, but it might be able to do as well. Do you want to find out if it is big enough and unstable enough by seeing it happen?

We don't know what could happen if we let global temperatures rise by another degree Celcius or so, and we probably shouldn't indulge our curiousity by waiting to see what does happen. If the final state of the planet is incompatible with the advanced industrial civilisation we've got at the moment, inaction will cost us everything we've got. That the massive flaw in the denialist argument.

Some of the right-wing nitwits here argue that the green agenda wants us to move back to a medieval muscle-powered economy, which is total nonsense. The rational green agenda does envisage roughly doubling the price of energy in the short term - over a decade or so - and since expenditure on energy currently represents 8% of our GNP this going to knock off about two years of economic growth (assuming the the usual

4% per year beloved by actuaries and the like) which is no worse than the US banking system did with the sub-prime mortgge crisis, and does offer the US a chance to get the oil monkey off it's back.

Check out the 1973 oil crisis sometime.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

devastation

Care to calculate how long that would take? Dehydration will take them out first.

Besides, i was discussing complete removal of all CO2, down to less than =

1 ppm.

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Suggesting that 'the final state of the planet is incompatible with the advanced industrial civilisation' is a massively flawed claim.

And fwiw 'denialist' is not the most honest of terms.

The level of green initiatives that true greenies want (not the very watered down mainstream politican's version) would absolutely cripple the economy. The resulting hardships would prove lethal, literally, and on a large scale.

NT

If the electric price is the same regardless of the day of the year and hour of day and there are no extra charge e.g. for the peak power consumed during the year or month, residential solar power does not make much sense.

From the utility company point of view, a high peak-to-average load ratio is problematic. Extra power generating capacity has to be provided for the few peak hours, while most of the time they are idle.

To minimize capital costs, these are usually relative simple (and fast starting) gas turbines with relatively low efficiency (no heat exchanger). The natural gas is quite often an expensive fuel. For this reason, the cost of producing electricity with these peak load gas turbines is significantly higher than with any nuclear, coal or hydroelectric base load stations.

At least in the European electric markets, the price for _all_ electricity on a specific time is determined by the most expensive production method (e.g. gas turbines) at the time, after all cheaper sources are already on line. Electric meters are being replaced with new ones that are capable of measuring consumption by the hour or even shorter periods. There is a risk that the electric price will vary by the hour or even by the actual market price for a specific day at an specific hour.

In such environment, it makes sense for the customer, if he/she can reduce the peak load during a few peak hours. There are of course several methods to reduce the air conditioning peak loads, using good insulation, using massive building constructions, dump the a/c heat into water (and discard it during off-peak hours) or using solar power (either solar thermal for absorbtion chillers or PV for compressors).

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Alright. It is a wrst case argument so,

"If the final state of the planet were incompatible with the advanced industrial civilisation we've got at the moment, inaction would cost us everything we've got. That the massive flaw in the denialist argument."

I don't think you can argue with that. The denialists argue that we can't predict the detailed effects of anthropogenic global warming with enough precision to absolutely justify doing anything to stop it, but the flip side of that argument is that we can't predict the kinds of things that have happened during warming episode - like runaway methane release as during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - and should be correspondingly cautious.

Denialism isn't the most honest of activities. Most of the denialist propaganda is bought and paid for by Exxon-Mobil and similar oraganisations with a substantial financial interest in continuing to extract and sell fossil carbon. The book "The Merchants of Doubt" gives chapter and verse on the history of the business of generating doubt about scientific evidence, which was started up by the tobacco companies - the book's title is a reference to a 1969 tobacco company memo on the subject.

"True greenies" are lunatics. I wouldn't be in the least surprised it it turned out that they were another wing of the denialist propaganda machine. If they didn't exist the denialists would certainly have found it useful to invent them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Over here they are planning to pump the exhaust gasses from power plants into underground storages like empty oil and gas fields. Its not about taking CO2 from the atmosphere.

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

You assume a deflated tin foil balloon will inflate again without cracking. You know that mining oil, gas and coal (ultimately) causes the surface to sink. This sinking must cause some cracking or a least alterations in the layers beneath the surface.

Secondly you are missing my point: putting a problem underground does not make a problem go away. This is a very elementary rule! It is not about my back yard, I'm against the whole concept of burrying what we don't need. Never heard of the saying 'keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer'?

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

You have this passion for misleading analogies. The "impervious" layers that have stopped raw natural gas - including CO2 - from leaking out over hundreds of millions of years are a couple of kilometres below the surface and compressed by the weight of the over- lying geology.

This a very different kind of seal than you find in a thin-walled tin- foil balloon. It has survived hundreds of millions of years of earthquakes and continental drift. When drilling for gas, it takes serious engineering to keep the bore-holes open to let the gas come out - search on casings and well screens.

Over geological time the surface is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo and there's a steady stream of earthquakes as the continental blocks drift around and collide. The may be cracking at the surface, but not a few miles down.

I didn't miss your point, but you've snipped my response to it

"We don't have to keep our CO2 buried for anything like that long - CO2 is taken out of the atmosphere by the natural process of weathering olivine - and other silicate rocks - to carbonates. In fact there is a plausible proposal to reverse anthropogenic global warming by milling a lot of olivine and spreading it on surf beaches around the world.

In the long term, these carbonates end up on the sea-floor, get subducted into the earths crust and get hot enough to release the CO2 again - it eventually comes back out of volcanoes - but there's a great deal of CO2 in transit, and we wouldn't be adding much."

The time constant for the weathering control loop in the various sytems that control CO2 levels in the atmosphere is IIRR about 50,000 years, which isn't long compared with the life-time of natural gas fields.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The price of natural gas has dropped dramatically in the USA in the last couple of years. We have an enormous supply of it.

For this

That is an artificial, politically driven pricing structure, which forces the economics in favor of PV solar.

John

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If you can make cheap solar cells with nano-structured titanium dioxide or whatever, residential roofs are a nice place to deploy them. That style of photo-voltaic cell doesn't seem to benefit from light-concentrating set-ups

And seems to be fairly popular in Australia ... though none of my relatives has bothered with it.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen