 | Oil Reserves: Where Ghawar goes, the rest of OPEC follows | The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | Doomers |  |
13 comments on The Bullroarer - Wednesday 28th May 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
13 comments on The Bullroarer - Wednesday 28th May 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
GAIA Host Collective
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!