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346 comments on Energy Vision 2050 - part I
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346 comments on Energy Vision 2050 - part I
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Alan, There are a lot of unanswered questions about geothermal. "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched". As for hydro, there are few untaped cost effective hydro resources in the United States. Jesse H. Ausubel evaluated the Land use requirements for hydro, and came up with some startling observations:
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/HeresiesFinal.pdf
Other than not letting so much water go over Niagara Falls unused, and refurbishing some old hydropower plants, Ontario is not included for new Canadian Hydro.
Manitoba, Quebec, Labrador/Newfoundland and BC are the potential sources. And Alaska might build the 5 GW Rampart Dam.
USGS says that the USA has 17 GW of potential small hydro. Small hydro is severely under used almost worldwide (EU best).
Elsewhere, Tajikistan, India (40 GW from memory), Nepal, Afghanistan, Siberia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile (4+ GW), Laos, several in Africa and elsewhere have significant hydroelectric potential. All of current African electrical demand could be meet by hydro + geothermal production with power to spare.
Alan
AlanfromBigEasy, Just because hydro resources exist does not make them cost effective resources. Small hydro may have very limited capacity factors. Ecologist long ago determined that daming every river might not be environmentally sound, and you might get opposition to building a dam at Niagara Falls on aesthetic grounds. Some past hydro projects have proven to be dangerous, for example the Glen Canyon dam which nearly failed some time ago, and the leaky Cedar Creek dam on the Cumberland, that has the potential to drown Nashville.
Niagara Falls already generates 5 GW (Sir Adam Beck on Ontario side). Relatively little water is allowed over the falls at night and a maximum during daylight during "tourist season".
In addition, seasonal maximums exceed the capacity of the power plants. An upgrade to Sir Adam Beck (including a 14.5 m diameter tunnel) is designed to reduce frictional losses, and reduce the % of time that water is "spilled" unused (after subtracting tourist flows) from 2/3rds to 15% of the time (from memory).
Paperwork is the limitation on small hydro in the USA. An operating hydroplant of 3 MW cannot generate enough income to pay for renewing the license after a 50 year renewal (several examples).
Alan
Small scale hydro seems to be a greatly under-estimated resource - the power of the Mississippi river, to name just one example, is worth harnessing as well.
On your original point - not only are geothermal and hydro greatly under-estimated, but solar, wind and biogas are as well (with ocean power - particularly tidal and ocean current also likely to make a significant impact by 2050).
This article doesn't seem to have considered the potential of renewables thoroughly at all and largely ignores the cost and safety aspects that make large scale nuclear power a non-starter for solving our energy needs.
How anyone who is peak oil aware can baulk at the very theoretical safety concerns of nuclear escapes me.
Power down will kill billions, as proposals to use all renewables for the whole world are based on technologies which we do not have deployed at the needed scale, and rely on considerable breakthroughs.
Any contribution form renewables will be welcome, and it has good potential to provide peak solar power in hot climates, wind power where there is a good wind resource, and so on.
The difficulty arises when for ideological reasons it is generalised into an assumption that we can do lots of things that we have not presently got the engineering for.
There are plenty of wind turbines built where it is not windy, solar cells where it is not sunny, and so on.
That is all great fun if it is taxpayers money which is being spent.
However in the serious situation that we are now in, we need ot get on and build what we have the engineering for.
If that changes with future progress, well and good.
The main effect to date of the theorising about what might happen in future and largely imaginary difficulties with nuclear has been to provide support for the lethal coal industry, and increase greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm all for renewables being deployed as fast as is practical, and also for nuclear power.
India is planning to exploit new rivers with one or two dams and a series of "run-of-the-river" plants downstream from the dams. Recent advances in tunneling make run-of-the-river more viable.
The dams release water as needed and, at scheduled times, the water enters the several run-of-river plants downriver.
If we "had it to do over again" many other rivers would have been developed this way.
Best Hopes for more Hydro,
Alan
Canada produces 1,000GWh/day from hydro, which is an average of 42,000MW. Quebec alone produces at an average rate of 20,000MW. A single hydro project (La Grande) has a maximum capacity of 15,000MW. Even Ontario already produces about 7,000MW from hydro, and the province is hardly 2/3 flooded.
I think it's safe to say that whoever wrote the linked article has no idea what he's talking about.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about geothermal. "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched".
Charles, You can say the same thing for Nuclear energy. Some of the questions might be who is going to finance them and do you want one in your backyard. Yet the paper gives us nuclear at 37% of total energy. I do not see that happens particularly in a financially decimated world economy that seems to be occurring as we speak. The prospects for geothermal are much closer to reality that an explosion (pun intended) in nuclear power plant building. It is essentially a first world solution.
The uncertainties are of a different order for geothermal as it is a much more immature technology.
That assumes that you are talking about using it for really substantial power generation, which means hot dry rock.
A number of problems have been encountered, notably getting just the right amount of fractioning in the rock to allow the water to flow through to the well which extracts it, and that problem will be different for every field.
At present it also costs a fortune - that may change, but we are talking about uncertainties.
You also can't build a geothermal plant just anywhere, and practically speaking the areas where you can hope to build them are relatively limited.
Iceland seems to be at the leading edge for geothermal. It is one of many renewable energy resources that I think we need to develop in order to keep the electric grid functioning. It will be a different set of technologies for each locale. I really cannot see nuclear at 17% of world production. Financing, adequate cooling water coupled with climate change, containment building production capacity these are just the direct difficulties The energy problem needs many diffuse solutions based on local resources and needs, not a handful of concentrated one designed to keep the energy fat cats engorged.
I'd like one under my backyard (say, 500 feet or so down) because then I'd have a cheap source of low-grade heat to keep my house heated in winter and perhaps cooled in summer with an absorption chiller.
As for what kind, I think the USA could start with roughly 100 GW of molten fluoride reactors operating as thorium breeders. The initial fuel loads could be obtained from the plutonium in spent PWR fuel, eliminating it permanently. Small, standard-sized reactors could be cranked out in factories in pieces small enough to be moved through tunnels and assembled underground, where they would be isolated from the environment (and terrorist-proof) but still very close to customers for waste heat.
Once you have supplied the local need for electricity, heating fuel and low-grade industrial process heat without a gram of fossil fuel, the impact of shrinking supplies becomes much more remote.
And a big plus is that you can keep the fuel molten as the rock around the reactor also melts. Geeze, what do you think the thermal conductivity of rock is? Nuclear power plants need substantial cooling. Putting them in a hole makes no sense at all.
Chris