Solar and Wind

[Wolverine]

Holy crap, where have I been when there's a hot thread about renewable energy including side tangents about nuclear? Oh yeah, I was at an IEEE renewable energy seminar all day! :true:

Ya know, when I was a kid, I really loved magic. I thought it was very cool. Then for my birthday, I got a magic book that explained how to do lots of amazing tricks. But I was disappointed - the tricks were so stupid! To pull a dollar bill out of a freshly cut lemon, you first hide a dollar bill in a hole in a lemon. To pull a rabbit out of a hat, you reach through a hole in the hat to a secret compartment in the bottom of the table. It's all fake! Smoke and mirrors! Slight of hand deception! I thought "There must be something more to this!" Show me some REAL magic! But as I grew up, I realized, no, that's really all there is. It's not magic. That's when I think I became an engineer. :rtft:

ld-025: That's how I feel about renewables - the reality is very disappointing. Show me the magic? Show me 1 GIGAWATT, 2 cents/KWH, and an 80 year lifespan, like a nuke unit. Renewables are really cool, and maybe some day there will be a break through, but there is no magic (keep in mind, I'm talking about mainland US energy production - I don't want to discount their value for remote areas or non-traditional markets).

The seminar was good, interesting, with good knowledgeable instruction, but until I see a breakthrough that moves a decimal point two steps to the right , I remain unimpressed. These are the pros and I'm asking "Is that all you got?"

- solar - makes a cute science fair project; not much output, fabulously cheap when you make someone else subsidize it.

- wind - it actually has some applications; you can get a little out of it, so it's not all bad; but it's a regional solution at best

- ethanol - takes more energy to make than it puts out. Creates smog, corn kills the soil, and you would have to plant 97% of US to meet present gas needs.

- tidal & wave (actually two separate things) - very cool - very small - very useless.

- biofuels - see solar.

- landfill gas - see wind

- efficiency - now there may be something to see here; more efficiency is always mo'better; but it can't outpace the growth rate in the long term.

(if anyone disagrees and wants to take me to school on any of these :15: with something other than a sales bochure, I will humbly yield the soapbox)

(But I'm making China's Three Gorges Dam off limits - that is a freaky big "renewable" - but it's a one-shot project.)

And now I will peer through the murky haze and tell you what the future holds: Micro-nukes. No, stop laughing. The technology is right around the corner. Oh, no wait a minute, that technology is actually thirty years old. How do we power deep space satellites and submarines? Oh yeah, now I remember. But I preach to the choir, I'm sure.

As someone once said "Renewable energy is great for people who are bad at math"

If no one complains, I'm taking credit for that one. 1 nuke equals 1100 megawatts. Show me 1100MW of renewables.Now show me four of those on one site (that's one nuke plant)

Now show me two or three sites that size in one state. It won't be Rhode Island or Connecticut.

store it. eventually, someone will come up with a way to use it.

Taking credit for this one too. Start the timer - within the next 100 years.
And Charles, unbunch your panties. LightenTFU.

 

[chaosiscash]

^^ :appl:

 

[Flyer_PE]

Taking credit for this one too. Start the timer - within the next 100 years.

Hell, France is recycling most of their fuel already. That's a lot better than storing 40+ years worth of the stuff at each plant site. If we re-enriched it would dramatically reduce the amount of waste waiting to never be put in Yucca Mountain.

 

[Slugger926]

The best way to produce and store solar energy is by producing biomass that can be turned into electricity, bio-deisel, or ethanol. Of course, water is required if you want to produce biomass effeciently.

Wolverine - There has been some breakthroughs in gasification ethanol production that creates a 300% energy gain. Their are still some economic issues with it when I attempted a business plan to put one in Western OK. The best places for cheap biomass production are not close to ethanol demand locations (dallas, or north east). It would cost for a plant in Western OK producing at least 50 million gallons per year, 96 cents per gallon to ship via truck to Dallas. It would cost $1 per gallon for production, so unless oil is a lot more expensive than it is now, there is no profit. Of course there will be breakthroughs in supply chain transportation.

Also a plant like this would require 180 trucks per day of hay with 20 trucks per day outgoing of ethanol. This would be like hauling oil from an oil well to the refinery in 5 gallon buckets.

Why haven't we done the micro-nukes yet? I would love one for my house.

 

[Freon]

If no one complains, I'm taking credit for that one. 1 nuke equals 1100 megawatts. Show me 1100MW of renewables.

I will give you due credit in all future uses of that axiom.

Freon

What ever happened to that little project our neighbors to the North were working on "CADU" I believe it was called. Canidian Deuterium reactor or something like that.

 

[chaosiscash]

That's a lot better than storing 40+ years worth of the stuff at each plant site. If we re-enriched it would dramatically reduce the amount of waste waiting to never be put in Yucca Mountain.

Thats why all those enrichment plants are scheduled for construction over the next 5 years. I smell money.

 

[benbo]

I agree with much of what everybody says here. If the government is bent on wasting a bunch of money I could see worse things to waste it on than energy stuff, but I’m sure they’d do it in a stupid way, so better not.

I also like market driven “green” technology like many here. For example, I’m a fan of nuclear, and cogeneration if it is market driven. If some refinery thinks they can make some money by building a turbine to use the steam they’d blow off into the air, more power to them, as long as they pay for the wire to get it to the grid. In CA cogen powers about 20% or so of the state. I’m guessing 10% nuclear, 10% wind, 10% hydro, a little solar, biomass, and geothermal. The rest is primarily combined cycle (which Al Gore might not consider green, but is pretty good with the kind of heat rates they get now). The old steam boilers barely run, except on really hot days.

To me, the problem about most energy storage schemes is that they involve a lot of loss and some kooky ideas. With the market the way it is, the most profitable are really only built around economic arbitrage and actually waste energy through conversion. Like pumped storage (use cheap energy to pump water uphill to flow downhill through a turbine when energy is expensive, so you can sell it). Others are wacky – like some guy who proposed using windmills to create energy to compress air to release into the intake of a gas turbine. In other words converting wind into electricity and back into wind (not really, but it sure sounds inefficient to me).

All this IMO.

 

[Dleg]

- solar - makes a cute science fair project; not much output, fabulously cheap when you make someone else subsidize it.- wind - it actually has some applications; you can get a little out of it, so it's not all bad; but it's a regional solution at best

- ethanol - takes more energy to make than it puts out. Creates smog, corn kills the soil, and you would have to plant 97% of US to meet present gas needs.

- tidal & wave (actually two separate things) - very cool - very small - very useless.

- biofuels - see solar.

- landfill gas - see wind

- efficiency - now there may be something to see here; more efficiency is always mo'better; but it can't outpace the growth rate in the long term.

(if anyone disagrees and wants to take me to school on any of these :15: with something other than a sales bochure, I will humbly yield the soapbox)

(But I'm making China's Three Gorges Dam off limits - that is a freaky big "renewable" - but it's a one-shot project.)

Well put!

On the issues of ethanol and biofuels, I'd like to take credit for this one: You can either grow food, or you can grow fuel. But not both. I've been saying this to my raving lunatic ag friends for years as they went on and on about how corn, and then sugar, and then switchgrass were going to revolutionize and "green up" the energy fields. But they could never answer the question of "what are we going to eat?" and "how much more of the earth will need to be tilled to do this?"

 

[Dleg]

That is absolutely not true.
It would take me a few hours to type the history of property rights in this country ... blah blah blah.... hippies.... blah blah .... libertarianism.... blah.... If the clean water act ended tomorrow, there would still be state regulators that would and could monitor treatment plants.

Dude, I wish I could live in the nice little white-picket fence world you live in. But unfortunately for me, I have had the pleasure of living outside wealthy world, and have seen that, quite contrary to the neat and tidy world of market theory, most people in the world live in squalor, and "the market" doesn't give a rat's ass.

 

[jeb6294]

Although, we really do need to figure out what do do with the spent fuel before we get too far along that path.

Uhhh...hello...I've only got two words for you...

[SIZE=14pt]Superman IV[/SIZE]

Sure it's nuclear weapons -vs- nuclear waste, but it'd still work.

 

[Chucktown PE]

Dude, I wish I could live in the nice little white-picket fence world you live in. But unfortunately for me, I have had the pleasure of living outside wealthy world, and have seen that, quite contrary to the neat and tidy world of market theory, most people in the world live in squalor, and "the market" doesn't give a rat's ass.

I know we don't agree on political or economic theory and I know that you live in an impoverished part of the world. I also understand that what you call the "free market" has ruined the quality of life for many people where you live. I think the breakdown in our communication always comes in what you call the free market and what I call the free market. I consider it to be something that hasn't really been in existence in this country since before the war fought over the South's secession. You consider it to be Tom DeLay's idea of the free market which bears very little resemblance to what I, Adam Smith, or our founding fathers deemed it to be.

I was reading an article on rationalism this weekend. Interesting stuff for the most part but the big take away for me was that for hundreds of years now we have had government intervention in our economies, government intrusions into our lives, loss of privacy, curtailing of liberties, etc. and yet always the solution to our problems in more government intervention. This then creates more poverty, more intrusion, more loss of privacy, more curtailing of liberty, and again the solution is more government intervention. I believe that the government intervention exacerbates the problems, not improves them. A perfect example which was dismissed as "blah, blah, blah" was my point about private property rights before Reconstruction. Government deemed property as "public" (by stealing it from the citizenry through immenent domain) such that industry couldn't be held accountable by private property owners for dumping pollutants on their land. Since there was no incentive for industry to not dump, they were given free reign to dump whatever the hell they wanted into rivers, lakes, etc. Government created the pollution problem by dismissing private property rights and then created the EPA to "deal with it."

 

[Dleg]

Again, I think you assume that all private property owners are created equal, and that there would be no other external influences. But what really happens, and why economics (as a "science") marched onward after Smith, is that all kinds of other things intervene to interfere with the workings of the market, at a local level anyway. Monopolies, corruption, etc. Sooner or later JoeBob's steel mill would become so powerful he could buy the local judges and the polluted property owner would be screwed. Power rests with those who make money. Even Adam Smith saw this and never once suggested that government wasn't necessary to intervene and prevent the "capitalists" (whom he disdained) from rolling over everyone in their paths.

Also, as I mentioned before, I am reading the Federalist Papers, which you say you disagree with, so I guess there's little chance we'll ever see eye to eye. Suffice it to say that I am comfortable our founding fathers did a good job in setting up our form of government.

 

[Chucktown PE]

Again, I think you assume that all private property owners are created equal, and that there would be no other external influences. But what really happens, and why economics (as a "science") marched onward after Smith, is that all kinds of other things intervene to interfere with the workings of the market, at a local level anyway. Monopolies, corruption, etc. Sooner or later JoeBob's steel mill would become so powerful he could buy the local judges and the polluted property owner would be screwed. Power rests with those who make money. Even Adam Smith saw this and never once suggested that government wasn't necessary to intervene and prevent the "capitalists" (whom he disdained) from rolling over everyone in their paths.

Okay, so the government can't be corrupted? And I disagree with you on Smith. Smith saw government as necessary to protect life, liberty, and property of capitalists. (for whom he did not hold disdain, but rather as a philosopher opposed the "trappings of wealth")

Also, as I mentioned before, I am reading the Federalist Papers, which you say you disagree with, so I guess there's little chance we'll ever see eye to eye. Suffice it to say that I am comfortable our founding fathers did a good job in setting up our form of government.

Agreed, that they did a good job in setting up a great form of government, but what we have today bears very little resemblance to what they created. The 10th amendment is a great example. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In that case, where did the Department of Education, the EPA, NASA, Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and etc. come from? Those would have required constitutional ammendments per our Constitution/Founding Fathers.

 

[Dleg]

Why do you say what we have today bears "very little"resemblance to the form of government we have today? I would say what we have today is very much what was envisioned. The changes you speak of do not alter the form of our government in as significant a manner as you portray. We still have to overall structure of checks and balances that was the primary thrust of the framers.

And as to your question of whether or not government can be corrupted, well of course it can and that was the whole purpose behind the Constitution, to prevent such corruption.

And yes, Adam Smith was not personally fond of the "capitalist" class - I don't have a reference nearby, but I remember direct quotes from him referring to them as "greedy" and "money grubbing" etc. He thought that society was driven and benefitted from them, of course (that was his whole point), but his descriptions of them as a class give away a general distaste for them.

 

[wilheldp_PE]

Heres a thought. Why don't we put it in a big hole in Nevada. All we need to do is spend the time and money to design and build it.
Oh wait, we already did that. Now we just have to convince the politicians to actually use it.

Well, we may have the hole, but we're not going to use it.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reports in a message to Nevadans that President Obama has ended the government's bid to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain and that instead, Obama will try to come up with another plan.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

^Thgat makes me sick. Billions spent and The Great One decides to 'devise a new plan.'

Wonderful. How long has that project been going and how much $$ was spent?

Man, I'm livid.

 

[wilheldp_PE]

^Thgat makes me sick. Billions spent and The Great One decides to 'devise a new plan.'
Wonderful. How long has that project been going and how much $$ was spent?

Man, I'm livid.

6.5 years (July 23, 2002) and $9 Billion (as of 2008) according to Wikipedia.

 

[Supe]

Don't fret guys, we all know that Obama will come up with a new solution. Because politicians make better scientists and engineers than... scientists and engineers.

 

[Capt Worley PE]

Don't fret guys, we all know that Obama will come up with a new solution. Because politicians make better scientists and engineers than... scientists and engineers.

Bingo.

Just reinforces my opinion that he's in so far over his head its pathetic. Too bad the media didn't look a little closer at his qualifications.

I guess he'll 'miracle' a solution.

 

[Chucktown PE]

So why do we want to put him in charge of more money?