Milestones and Trends in Renewable Energy 295
Sterling D. Allan writes "Some reflections and projections: The year 2005 saw large wind power installments come into a price range where they are now competitive with traditional grid prices. 2006 could see several solar designs do the same. Cold fusion was boosted with two, concurrent and independent sonofusion breakthroughs, though the stigma in the name is still deeply seated. 2006 could see floating wind turbines arrive on the commercial scene -- floating in the water like oil rigs, or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium. 2006 will see at least three companies offering after-market kits for adding Brown's gas (H and O from electrolysis, common ducted) to the air intake of vehicles for enhanced mileage and performance. Many other fuel economizing systems are slated to mature in the marketplace. Climate change evidence will continue to mount. It will yet be years before we harness lightning, but stable tornado systems prototypes that tap waste heat from power plants could arrive this coming year. Will 2006 be the year that clean energy becomes more the vogue than cool computer gadgets?"
Re:Gadgets (Score:3, Interesting)
mandatory viewing, MS vs IBM
Question for all greens (Score:4, Interesting)
How should we generate electricity until that happens? Let's assume that energy demand will not decline any time soon, but rather will continue to rise.
Coal?
Oil?
Natural gas?
Nuclear?
Which of these is the least-worst to you?
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, PBRs have a very large drawback. It is nearly impossible to extract useful material from the spent fuel pebbles. Manufacturing these pebbles is not a trivial process, by the way.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of integral fast reactors. They are not modular in design, but these plants are designed with the entire fuel cycle in mind and can burn up nuclear fuel so efficiently that the waste degrades to background radiation in just 300 years.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also impractical to extract useful materials from spent fuel rods of conventional reactors, unless you're running a weapons program and don't care about the cost. Pu from commercial reprocessed fuel is expensive to separate, and it has a negative value once you've separated it -- the extra hassle of designing your fuel fabrication plant to be able to handle Pu (which is much more radioactive than enriched uranium) dwarfs the cost of the uranium you save.
If you're concerned about uranium running out, the incremental approach will be to go to cycles with higher burnup and fuel efficiency. CANDU reactors are like this, particularly if used with thorium-uranium fuel elements.
Re:no mention of bio-diesel (Score:3, Interesting)
To satisfy ultra-low sulfur requirements, Fischer-Tropsch diesel makes more sense. Converting stranded natural gas capacity around the world to FT diesel production would add 4 million barrels of oil per day equivalent liquid fuel production.
More about integral fast reactors (Score:4, Interesting)
There is only one thing worries me about modern nuclear plants, and that is the access to cooling water. If you plan on using rivers or lakes, you need to be pretty sure that global warming will not dry them up.
Much as I like relatively low overhead technologies like wind, solar, bio-Diesel and bio-ethanol, I have to admit that I'm a convert to the idea of fast neutron sodium-cooled non-breeder plants. They even seem to be relatively terrorist-proof. And they would provide some well paid tech jobs that are not just in moving bits around.
America (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Until It Hurts (Score:4, Interesting)
I think markets are good things, but I remember learning about external costs and market failure in like week 3 of microeconomics class.
Energy markets have HUGE externalities (national security, environmental impacts, etc.), so government involvement is actually necessary to achieve the 'right' solutions. Of course, that leads to the topic of governments' track record at successfully correcting externalities and market failure...
Sonofusion results are about neutron generation (Score:3, Interesting)
The big-news sonofusion results in 2005 were about neutron, not power, generation. There was some evidence that acoustically-driven cavitation could produce temperatures high enough to result in fusion-generated neutrons. This is quite exciting in terms of understanding the basic processes involved. However, in terms of the driving physics, this is hot fusion: a very small volume of material may be heated to extremely high temperatures for a very short time, resulting in a tiny amount of fusion occuring.
Due to fundamental physical constraints it is very unlikely that such a process is scalable in a way that will produce more power than is required to generate it. The bottom line for hot fusion is that the cross-sections for loss processes are orders of magnitude larger than those for the fusion process itself, and the losses scale as the surface area of the hot volume while power production scales with the volume. This means that the cube-square law strongly favours really big hot-fusion reactors (something the size of a star seems about optimal).
So while it is not impossible that one day we'll all drive cars powered by sonofusion, I don't think anyone working in the field is suggesting that.
Re:Until It Hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
The market is good at eventually seeking the best answers, however the market cannot handle very large shocks very quickly
Luckily, the oil is not going to disappear overnight. Even as we approach the end of the available reserves, the flow of oil will just slow, not stop. Long before that, as the easy-to-reach oil reserves are depleted, the price will rise as the needed oil is drawn from less and less accessible sources. At some point extracting oil from shale and tar sands will become cost-effective.
As the price gradually rises, more and more alternatives to oil will become cost-effective. As use of alternative sources increases, the investment into them will improve their efficiency, through process improvements and through mass production, making them even better competitors.
the problem is, oil is so ingrained in our current economy it's going to take the market a long while to find adequate substitutes for all its uses without an outside shove.
The transition from oil to other energy sources will occur naturally, through normal market forces, and without any extreme shocks. No "outside shove" is required to make the energy source transition. That said, I think there is value in governmental influence pushing toward cleaner energy sources, since market forces won't naturally push us in that direction. I think "pollution taxes" (or pollution credits, which are similar) are a good idea as they can both bring market forces to bear on keeping the environment clean and can also provide funding for alternative energy research.
Re:Oil became expensive, not wind became cheaper (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember debates about whether electric cars really are greener since they rely on things like coal generated electricity to charge them. It's something to think about.
Arguments pro generally said that large scale electricity generators were more efficient per unit energy than a single internal combustion engine and that their pollution controls were also better per unit of energy.
Can't remember arguments con.
Even more interesting is if you figure in the costs of pollution, which the producer and consumer don't really see directly. Some farmer is paying more to grow crops, and some private citizens, insurance companies, and hospitals are paying more for health care. These all filter down to consumers and tax payers.
Unfortunately, we also have to figure in the effects of poverty and the benefits of cheap, but short-term polluting energy sources. Lost human potential also costs us something.
Also how do you quantify quality of life? Makes your head spin.
What crap. A reality check follows. (Score:4, Interesting)
These things are big - the towers are 200 to 300 feet high. It takes 500 of them to equal one coal plant. And bigger wind turbines are coming. The latest General Electric 3MW turbines are so big they're only being considered for offshore installations. The Cape Cod Wind Farm project [capewind.org] has produced much grumbling: [capecodtoday.com] "A 24 square mile industrial park the size of the island of Manhattan, 40 story turbines permanently scarring our ocean horizon, 580 lights destroying our nightscape, 130 air and sea navigation hazards in the middle of some of the foggiest air and waters in the world..." This is a generic problem with wind and solar energy. Once it starts really working, the installations are huge, because the energy densities are so low.
The downside of wind power, of course, is that it's intermittent. Typically, average power is only 30% of rated power. Of course, you don't get to pick when you get power. So you either need energy storage (like a pumped storage plant) or excess capacity in non-wind generation. Which means building more plant.
Still, wind power is real. Unlike much of the other stuff mentioned, like the "magnet engines" (an entry-level bozo idea), the "neutron generator" (a misunderstanding of a well-understood device), and "blacklight power" (generally considered to be a scam).
Tidal power seems attractive, but there are only about 20 good sites worldwide [worldenergy.org].
The Athabasca Oil Sands projects [oilsands.cc] are already producing 1 million barrels of oil per day, and that should double by 2010. The scale of the operation is huge. It takes two tons of sand to yield one barrel of oil. That's one Panama Canal every ten months. Want a job as a heavy equipment operator? Move to Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. Rents have passed Silicon Valley levels, and the apartment vacancy rate is zero.
The future looks like coal. Too much coal. China is building about 50,000MW of coal-fired electric plants per year. US coal consumption has been roughly constant for a while, but will probably go up as oil prices increase.
Nuclear may make a comeback, probably when coal gets too ugly.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Until It Hurts (Score:3, Interesting)
From another aspect, I recently had a conversation with consumer relations at Chrysler. I have decided my next vehicle purchase will be diesel. Chrysler manufactures a diesel Liberty annd they are considering the Commander, but not the Wrangler. Wrangler is all that interests me, I won't be buying a Jeep. My purchase will go towards the demand of a competing product. It will also translate to a change in demand for diesel cars in general, as well as diesel (or ideally, biodiesel) demand. In the future when Chrysler is making decisions for future models they will look at what is selling and what is not, and plan appropriately. Want to make a prediction on how many resources US automakers will allocate to big SUVs in the next few years? Personally, I expect a swing back towards smaller cars as a result of one person here and one person there influencing the market.
Maybe my demand is like a grain of sand on the beach. Some markets are huge. But if everybody said "I'm too small to make a difference, so I won't bother", then there would be no demand and the product would fail.
At my local grocery I have noticed a subtle shift over the years. I live in a relatively small town and have shopped at the same place for 5 years. Products that I use on a regular basis have increased shelf space. Either I'm just lucky, or my demand has affected that store's buying practices.
Producers and consumers drive change. They are the market. If you think the market is irrational, you aren't looking at all of it's influences.
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
First off, you're confusing nuke-happy France with the United States. They're continally building new nuclear power plants while I don't believe the United States has built a new one (outside of Newport News, at least) since the 1970's. We're the ones that want coal*.
Secondly, I was under the impression that the Germans had already devised the greenest option yet: buy electricity from France.
*(Actually, we don't seem to want either. Both coal and nuke plants are intended for putting out a steady amount of energy for long periods of time without variation, while electricity use spikes in the summer when we all turn on our air conditioners and plummets in the winter when we turn on our fossil fuel furnaces. Unlike coal or nuclear plants, natural gas plants can be turned on and off at a moments notice and seem to be the power source of choice in today's US market, at least until the coal and/or nuclear people find something to do with excess electricity during the winter, such as making hydrogen.)
Biodiesel & Algae (Score:3, Interesting)
The US Govt conducted studies on the cultivation of algae with high oil content, using open-raceway ponds. Greenfuel Technologies [greenfuelonline.com] have an enclosed system using algae to synthesize fuel from CO2 waste, such as from power plants. Synthetic Genomics [syntheticgenomics.com] are working on genetically engineered organisms that secret biofuels (they are focused more on methanol or hydrogen, but the same approach could produce vegetable oil).
You can get around the whole problem of conventional farming and consuming too much arable land. None of these approaches are fully proven on a commercial scale yet. . . But then, a lot of things we discuss on Slashdot are more far-fetched than making biodiesel fuel from algae. It's hardly fair to wave away the whole idea of biofuel as if it were some annoying insect buzzing around your head, just because you found out soybeans won't fill the bill.