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13 comments on The Bullroarer - Wednesday 28th May 2008
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13 comments on The Bullroarer - Wednesday 28th May 2008
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Sizewell B goes down for unknown reasons, Japanese reactors get taken down by earthquakes, French reactors get taken out by water shortages, Russian reactors get taken down by operator initiated meltdowns etc etc etc
There's always a reason why nuclear is still somehow considered reliable but CSP with storage somehow isn't.
What a crock. They are equivalent, and CSP will end up being a lot cheaper and with none of the side effects.
As for dry rock geothermal, I'm in accord with the MIT guys and all the people currently putting money into these ventures.
If CSP has overnight storage via heated salt or fluid that doesn't solve the rainy week problem. Some say use HVDC connections.. been there done that and I'm now 30% coal dependent when I was coal free two years ago. A gigawatt week of storage would be astronomical using say flow batteries at $500 per kwh.
The way things are going I think before long there won't be enough spare cash for really big ticket items. That's not just nukes but CSP plants that can achieve these economies of scale.
We have been living in a golden age of technological achievement and quite frankly, if CSP was ever going to be possible to deliver baseload, cheaply and reliably it would have been done decades ago. Edison himself, who was more responsible than anyone for the power grid, gave much tthought to solar energy and thought it weas the way forward. In the decades since his death, we have achieved so much more technogically than even he could have dreamed of, but we still do not have baseload solar energy.
In an era which is going to see structural social changes and an unhinging of the consumer/industrial/financial complex, giant technological leaps forward are going to be few and far between. I'd put the chances of large scale CSP right up there with interstellar space travel. The only growing sector of energy management in the future is going to be radical conservation/reduction/elimination areas and most of this will be done with clever thinking rather than snazzy new gadgets.
A whole lot of claims here with nothing to back them up.
CSP was invented 3 decades ago. Oil and coal were plentiful and cheap, so it languished.
Now oil and coal are getting expensive, and the technology is coming into its own.
In a few decades time it will just be the way we generate most of our power - cheap and ubiquitous.
The places where people are building CSP plants don't get rainy weeks - thats how they choose sites.
But you are correct that a larger grid with bigger interconnects would alleviate the problem if it ever did occur in a particular location.
No one is suggesting we use flow batteries for really large scale storage.
Care to explain why cash for power projects will be scarce in an era of high energy prices ?
Its the one sure-fire way to make money...
Governments won't have much money because of war, welfare and fuel tax cuts. Private developers all seem to want subsidies or tax credits from those governments which may not be forthcoming. Oil majors may go the way of the dodo, I note both Exxon and Xerox have the same repeated letter. Then there is the 'Law of Receding Horizons'. Have Khosla or Google made any money yet from energy projects? I'll just allude to a prominent fuel cell developer that never made the expected billions. Maybe Toyota made a good call with hybrid cars. Wind power is now a mature technology. I don't see unambiguous signs there is another technology ready for prime time. That includes CSP, CCS, dry rock geothermal, wavepower and algae oil.
Neither war, welfare nor fuel tax cuts are guaranteed. And governments aren't the organisations that matter - global capital rules the roost now.
While I don't support corn ethanol, Khosla had made plenty of money from it.
Google only started investing in energy last year, so its too early to say if they have made money - we'll see once their investments have matured - however Chevron and Goldman Sachs have long and very successful track records.
And I'll bet Google does find at least one way of producing renewable energy cheaper than coal, as they are aiming to do.
30 odd CSP plants under construction (plus the 10 already in existance) seems to be conclusive proof that CSP is viable.
The question is - when does it get cheaper than gas, wind and nuclear - 2010 or 2015. Its going to happen before too long as economies of scale are realised.
I'm puzzled by the wavepower "race" in Western Australia.
CETO has a couple of full-scale working wavepower generators already operating near Fremantle. (Albeit only test units at the moment, but their progress reports have been good.) - So I wonder why Griffin Energy went all the way to the USA for the Ocean Power buoy technology? Anybody know?
Aha! Could this be it? The forthcoming WA Govt. Binningup desalination plant has shortlisted *both* CETO and Griffin Energy for their renewable energy supply...
http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=32&ContentID=75063
http://www.carnegiecorp.com.au/files/asx-announcements/2008/Desal%20Anno... (small pdf)
It may be that the Griffin / Ocean Power joint venture is the only way for Griffin to get some of the desal wave action? (Presuming that CETO doesn't want/need a partner like Griffin?)
Looking at both technical designs, the CETO system would appear to have a design advantage for desal, because it produces pressurised seawater directly, whereas Ocean Power converts buoy movement to electricity at the buoy's anchor point, and would then be subject to further conversion losses using electric pumps to pressurise the intake seawater at the desal plant.
Big Gav's NZ link above quotes CETO at $AUD300M for 50 MegaWatt electric generating capacity ($6M per MW) whereas TheWest News piece above suggests that Ocean Power would be around $2.2M per MW. Who knows whether these figures are actually comparable (or for that matter if either of them is realistic!) but if so, Ocean Power seems well ahead in the "race", even allowing for energy conversion losses.
Although this strikes me as somewhat strange; looking at the competing designs... http://www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8008&view=next...,
...I would have thought Ocean Power's surface buoys look to have less wetted volume, and therefore are likely to produce less lifting power than the submerged CETO floats...
Maybe we'll only know for sure when the Binningup desal plant makes its choice!
I agree with Big Gav. One way or another we are going to have to go with CSP, wind, wave, geothermal - anything that isn't nuke or coal. The sooner we start, the better. Also, the big, Soviet style centrally planned power model is defunct. There will be some, but power generation, mainly from CSP, needs to become local and small scale with battery and grid back up. Conservation is also an absolute necessity - we need to learn to get by with much less. The switch will require quite sophisticated software and systems to ensure maximum efficiency. Not a watt can be wasted!
I lived on a boat for two years (it is how I came to Australia). We, a family of 5, used approx 4.8kWh per day, mostly generated by sun and wind. We didn't scimp. I needed a cold beer (or two, maybe three) every day and "she who must be obeyed" needed ice in her G&T. Having ice on boat mid ocean takes some doing! Now we live in the burbs we use 10 times as much power, not counting the car, the office, the street lamps and all the rest.
Oil is apparently still too cheap for the punters to start seriously conserving energy.
I was talking to a plumber friend the other day who was telling me about all the tricks that are used to prevent the waste water in high-rise buildings causing problems after it's flushed (potential problems include damaging pressure surges). I said why don't they just remove the impediments, put a turbine at the bottom and generate some power out of all those wasted flushes! I was only joking but he said he'd never heard of anyone trying that - so we coined a name for this idea, the "turd-bine"...
Excellent - maybe you should patent the idea (and name).
But I think these sorts of schemes (combined with energy efficient designs) to extract small amounts of available energy that are readily available will become more and more worthwhile.
I expect that in 40 years time every building will have solar panels, better insulation and an array of energy harvesting and energy efficient devices within and supporting it - by and large being self-sufficient in energy.