Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Descan]

Well there's your answer. We colonize Hell and turn over it's fertile volcanic soil to tree farms.

Plus, ready access to geothermal and damned souls as two other renewables!

[10ebbor10]

The numbers, IIRC, are based on historical averages up to 2012. Solar power price probably has dropped in recent years. Anyway, the largest problem with solar power is it's abominable capacity factor. Decent solar (or other renewable) power generation will require far more storage than any other powersource.

That's only true if it's a big enough share of the energy portfolio to start displacing baseload capacity.  We'd need to get it up to around 30% of total capacity or so before we'd even need to start worrying about storing energy.

Uhm, not really. After all, it's unlikely that the ups and down of solar will exactly match the ups and downs of the power grid. While there's partial overlap (most of the energy use is during daytime, after all), it's far from perfect. Therefore, in practice, solar and other non-controllable renewables end up deplacing conventional fossil fuel generation. This means that plants constantly have to spin up or down to meet fluctuating demand, sharply reducing efficiency and financial sustainability. This, combined with low coal prices, has resulted that many modern gas plants are shut down (oft with only 1-3 years of operation) in favour of cheaper, decade old coal plants.

It's however true for nuclear. As long as it doesn't leave baseload (+ a small margin), no storage is needed. If you go above a 50%-60% , capacity factor drops, but it's still perfectly feasible.

[Tellemurius]

Typically, you get far more use out of making efficient use out of what you have rather than just going straight for clean energy.  Of course, if you are going to make clean energy work you probably have to make everything efficient anyway so....

Anyway, only thing related I'm actually doing is water management: collecting air conditioner water runoff for use later & shorter showers so less energy expenditure heating em up (plus of course slowly making house more insulated).

Have looked into solar panels and stuff.  I think the yrs to repay is something like 10-15 yrs now?  Slowly but steadily becoming more affordable.

Actually you can probably dropped that down to 8 years now, its not that hard to setup a system with only 30k now.

[Zrk2]

I'm studying Nuclear Engineering, so I'm pretty biased in favour of using nuclear for base load generation (~75%) with the rest made up of sources that are easier to activate on the go and renewables to cover the last little bit. In order to account for those fluctuations in energy consumption pumped storage might be the best bet, and then you can use clean nuclear power generated over night to pump the water up, then allow it to run down during the day, generate the needed power then, and actually turn a profit doing it.

That seems a bit high for baseload, nighttime usage falls quite a bit below 70% of peak demand.

I wasn't sure of specifics, but I remember reading that France generates something like 80% of their power using nuclear, so I took a number from that. And even if we do generate surplus power, then that's all the better for pumped storage.

The water storage seems feasable: going off this google result the costs are about $100/MW-hour but as low as half that under ideal conditions (even demand for eight hours).  But a reasonably economic solar project would be cheaper then nuclear+storage combined when it comes to meeting peak demand.  On the other hand, every time it rains you get free energy!

There's an old mine near my parents' cottage where the pumped storage was proposed, so it's definitely been discussed before, and doesn't look to hard to implement if someone could find the political will to do it.

Step 1: Unearth Ayn Rand's coffin.
Step 2: Link it to as large a turbine as is feasible given current standards of material manufacturing and engineering.
Step 3: Reform U.S. law and social norms to fit with the common model of social democracy, including but not limited to a universal guarantee of human rights, including the right of all humans to the basic necessities of life, such as clean water, healthful food, medical care, housing, &c., as well as strict limitations on predatory business practices.
Step 4: Unlimited Power

As someone significantly more sympathetic to her ideas than average I think this should definitely be tested.

You'll need ungodly amount of land still.

Enter Canada.

[mainiac]

You'll need ungodly amount of land still.

Enter Canada.

That's exactly what the Americans do in the Fallout universe once the oil runs out.  (Dunno why they are using oil in this way instead of coal and natural gas or nuclear)

[Funk]

What we really need to do is put more work in to makeing green methanol to replace fossil fuels for road use.
basicy i want thisplant
 As soon as you can get it down to $1.50 per litre then market for fossil fuels is massively reduced.

methanol need barely any changes to our fuel suppy, and almost petrol engines will need little to no changes.

[10ebbor10]

What we really need to do is put more work in to makeing green methanol to replace fossil fuels for road use.
basicy i want thisplant
 As soon as you can get it down to $1.50 per litre then market for fossil fuels is massively reduced.

methanol need barely any changes to our fuel suppy, and almost petrol engines will need little to no changes.

It's not, by far, carbon neutral or environementally beneficient. I mean, the fuel itself is carbon neutral, but the CoČ in it is drawn from fossil fuel power. Also power is actually generated, as the system merely functions as an energy carrier for renewables. Stuff would be much more efficient if you just cut out the middle man.

IE, instead of going:

Fossil fuel plant = CoČ + Electricity => CoČ + Green Electricity = Green Methanol => Cars
Just do this:
Renewables = Electricity
Fossil Fuel => Cars

((While fossil fuel plants are still more efficient than cars, the losses from methanol production, hydrogen hydrolysis, and other systems far outweight the benefits. Really, this is basically the entire idea of hydrogen cars, only the hydrogen is processed into Methanol))

I'm studying Nuclear Engineering, so I'm pretty biased in favour of using nuclear for base load generation (~75%) with the rest made up of sources that are easier to activate on the go and renewables to cover the last little bit. In order to account for those fluctuations in energy consumption pumped storage might be the best bet, and then you can use clean nuclear power generated over night to pump the water up, then allow it to run down during the day, generate the needed power then, and actually turn a profit doing it.

That seems a bit high for baseload, nighttime usage falls quite a bit below 70% of peak demand.

I wasn't sure of specifics, but I remember reading that France generates something like 80% of their power using nuclear, so I took a number from that. And even if we do generate surplus power, then that's all the better for pumped storage.

France doesn't use Nuclear for baseload. Roughly 1/3 of their plants run in load following mode. (Specifically, the third that has been refuelled in the last 6 months.) This is the main reason that French nuclear only has a capacity factor of about 80%, and why France has such a large pumped storage capacity in comparison to other European nations.

The water storage seems feasable: going off this google result the costs are about $100/MW-hour but as low as half that under ideal conditions (even demand for eight hours).  But a reasonably economic solar project would be cheaper then nuclear+storage combined when it comes to meeting peak demand.  On the other hand, every time it rains you get free energy!

There's an old mine near my parents' cottage where the pumped storage was proposed, so it's definitely been discussed before, and doesn't look to hard to implement if someone could find the political will to do it.

Well, for Europe the decline of pumped storage is mainly due to a massive overcapacity in the European grid, which is a result of subsidized renewable power.

[Orange Wizard]

New Zealand doesn't use nuclear power, either. We are a nuclear-free state and the entire country seems to have a phobia about it.
Anyway, we get most of our power from hydroelectrics. There's this huge uproar about the flooding involved in setting stations up - which is fair enough, we don't have a lot of land here. These lakes already take up about half of it.

[Descan]

I DO like the idea of a nuclear base-load, with the molten-salt towers, (The good nuclear ones, the ones that have barely any waste and use thorium :v), and use renewables based on location. I also like the idea of converting renewable/nuclear energy into synthetic fossil fuels, so that we can continue to use our massive fossil fuel infrastructure (cars and all), rather than the massive overhaul we would need otherwise.

[sneakey pete]

The main point of Methanol for fuel is to get us a chemical (read, highly dense) fuel type that is renewable, unlike oil, which will run out at some point in the future, or electricity or hydrogen, which aren't nearly as dense.
As said, for a small cost any car can run on methanol, so nothing has to change in terms of the way we make and use vehicles. The distribution network for fuel doesn't have to change, peoples driving habbits don't have to change, the resources we use to make cars doesn't have to change (no hunting down rare resources for batteries). Its not really about reducing emissions.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

All agriculture could be converted to producing ethanol, and then all engines can be built to use only ethanol from then on. Consider this my Dwarfy Solution B: energy through booze production.

[alexandertnt]

Biofuels compete with regular farms for land, right? Wouldn't that make it harder still for people who are already struggling for food to feed themselves?

[Graknorke]

Biofuels compete with regular farms for land, right? Wouldn't that make it harder still for people who are already struggling for food to feed themselves?

The world already has sufficient food production. The only issue is that it's not spread evenly. It's more or less a logistics problem.

[alexandertnt]

Biofuels compete with regular farms for land, right? Wouldn't that make it harder still for people who are already struggling for food to feed themselves?

The world already has sufficient food production. The only issue is that it's not spread evenly. It's more or less a logistics problem.

Makes sense. We should probably deal with this logistics problem first though.

[sneakey pete]

There was a factoid i read once that 90% of Australia's Arable landmass would need to be dedicated to producing biofuel crops to supply all of Australia's needs.
So no, there still is an issue of food production. If we produce enough now, we'd have to produce less to make enough biofuel.