Expanding the Electricity Grid May Be a Mistake 412
Perhaps T. Boone Pickens was onto something. Al writes "An article in Technology Review argues that plans to string new high-voltage lines across the US to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, could be an expensive mistake. What's needed instead are improved local and regional electricity transmission, the development of an efficient and adaptable smart grid, and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than transmitting power from North Dakota to New York City."
local power - yes, carbon capture - no ? (Score:5, Informative)
I spell carbon capture "c o a l s u b s i d y".
It's not going to work, it's just another way to subsidize coal companies, as if letting them blow the tops off of mountains wasn't enough.
Installing renewables local to where the power is needed is, of course, a great idea.
rickroll (Score:1, Informative)
(the only possible reason for the link to youtube showing 'visited' for me :P)
Re:local power - yes, carbon capture - no ? (Score:3, Informative)
It makes perfect sense to put wind farms where the *gasp* wind is.
Sure, but if the wind is so far away that a huge portion of power is lost in transmission, you may want to look for more local sources of power (wind or otherwise).
I suggest the Northeastern Corridor bring their Power Grid up to 2009 [instead of the 1940s] with redundant regional zones and smart grid management with the focus on optimum distribution before it shoots it's own mouth off and attempts to destroy intelligent power sourcing from the Midwest. The Pacific Northwest will be supporting the Midwest and so will the Southwest, you can count on it.
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Informative)
It does when you beam the electricity to ground-stations from orbiting solar power satellites.
Be careful what you wish for (Score:4, Informative)
The slowing of the Earth's rotation is already the cause of those damnable leap seconds [wikipedia.org]. You want more?
You Gotta Be Joking (Score:5, Informative)
You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No. The wind is surface wind, so imagine how much wind is actually in the atmosphere. The wind pushing your clouds is a bit higher up. With sunlight, the energy is either heating your tiles, or charging them. It is a preference, not a robbery of some sort. And we find charge has more uses than hot tiles.
Free, though, it is not, and you are correct about there being a downside. It is in the form of cost, infrastructure, and energy efficiency, among others.
The quarter wave problem (Score:5, Informative)
You're absolutely right, and that's why we need either nuclear power or a large power transmission grid to lower CO2 emissions.
The problem with the large power grid is that power is generateed at a 60 Hz frequency. This corresponds to a 5000 km wavelength. A quarter wave line [google.com] has a length of 1250 km (about 780 miles for the unit-challenged).
A quarter wavelength line has the property that a short circuit at one end appears as an open circuit at the other end and an open circuit appears at a short. This makes it very difficult to transmit 60 Hz power over a line of approximately that length, the line must be "impedance matched", by putting capacitors and/or inductors at several points along the line. Worse still, the line impedance varies with load, because when a higher current runs through the wires they heat up and, by dilation, lengthen and rest at a lower position, thereby increasing the capacitance to ground, which means those capacitors and inductors must be variable.
One solution is to use direct current [google.com], but that's as expensive or more than matching the impedance, although the grid becomes easier to stabilize when direct current is used.
All in all, any solution for making more electricity available is expensive. Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Informative)
but from the tone of your post, you dont seem to be the type of person willing to generate your own power.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Informative)
Has anyone considered the meteorological effects of removing all that energy from the atmosphere?
Yes, and it's insignificant.
According to the NOAA [noaa.gov], an average hurricane releases roughly 14 Terawatt-hours of energy per day. According to the EIA [doe.gov], annual global electrical production comes to about 20 Terawatt-hours.
To summarize, one single hurricane can power the entire world (with room to grow) for an entire year if captured for two days.
Now consider how many hurricanes and typhoons there are in a year, how long they each last, and do the math. And don't forget about lesser weather phenomenon like thunderstorms (An average thunderstorm releases about 10 gigawatt-hours) and wind in general, which also release a non-trivial amount of energy.
Re:Yeah (Score:2, Informative)
PV and Stirling, how cute.
Neither is base load ready.
try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal [wikipedia.org]
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:5, Informative)
For longer lines, HVDC is probably better than AC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission [wikipedia.org]
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not very familar with this sort of thing at all, but I thought the problem with DC in powerlines was you'd need absolutely massive lines to properly transmit power any sort of real distance.
Actually, HVDC can carry about 40% more power over the same lines, compared to AC. The main drawback is that you need to convert to/from AC on either end. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission [wikipedia.org]
(I know, not that authoritative, but it cites lots of sources I can't be bothered to copy).
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:4, Informative)
Human energy utilization is on the order of 15 terawatts. The sun hits an earth size disc at the earth's orbit with more than 100 petawatts (I would guess that at least 30 or 50 petawatts actually make it to the ground).
There is some chance that it will cause problems, but we don't have the capacity to build up fast, so we are going to have quite some time where we are harnessing 1/10,000 of the Sun's energy. We can use that experience to decide if 1/1,000 of it poses some risk to the environmental conditions that we like to live in.
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:3, Informative)
Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
Also the least future proof. Electricity or at least energy consumption will increase, barring some disaster that leaves this all a moot point anyway.
Re:small nuclear powerplants (Score:3, Informative)
I think this is what you're looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S [wikipedia.org]
Toshiba isn't the only company working on this either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation [wikipedia.org]
DC power line is the only economical way (Score:5, Informative)
Arguments against DC power lines is based on ignorance.
Québec and Manitoba have big power lines and they save tons of money. The cost of the converters on both ends is offset by the lower cost of the power lines. DC power lines have less loss and only need 2 wires instead of three. You don't have the inductive losses in DC lines.
When the line exceeds 1000km the savings are huge.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think I've ever seen a more undeserved insightful mod. That was non-specific heckling without a point.
Here are some points for you: the amount of innovation in green energy is tremendous these days. Take your pick, some of these are from this very site:
24/7 baseload electricity from the sun for utilities, great for sunny climates, cost-competitive with coal [solar-reserve.com]
Steady large-scale wind power from stacked kites [tudelft.nl]
Cutting consumption and greenhouse gasses with microgrids [lbl.gov]
As seen on this very site, cost-effective solar thermal energy used to drive a stirling engine [raw-solar.com]
Highly cost-effective thin-film solar electricity [skyline-solar.com]
Solar thermal panels for directly heating water [wordpress.com]
For efficiency, passive solar design for buildings [azsolarcenter.com]
Inserting vertical wind turbines into electric towers for using existing structure [metropolismag.com]
Tidal energy, pros and cons; Denmark certainly believes in the pros [answers.com]
That's just off the top of my head. Renewable energy is a matter of studying your surroundings and finding what is appropriate. Each locale is different, and of course, all of us can benefit from more efficient design than what we used on this past century while presuming that fossil fuel energy is cheap and disposable. All we need to do is stop being sloppy and wasteful. ...Or you can just be pointlessly negative on the internet. :)
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Informative)
And in case anybody doesn't want to RTFA (Read The Fine Abstract), the key word is "negligible", as in:
Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature, and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO2 and air pollutants.
Re:Changing technology (Score:2, Informative)
we could easily use reflective satellite dishes on our roofs to focus the sun's energy to small steam generators...it uses the simple technology of radiant heat instead of trying to catch falling photons and you wouldn't have to transmit the electricity more than a few meters. It's also much cheaper to produce and would create a lot of manufacturing jobs that you could hope to keep local...
Re:Nuclear power (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear is only a partial solution (currently) also. It is all mostly in your wiki article, but the high points IMHO:
1) shortage of Uranium mining (used at 2* the rate it is mined currently.)
2) shortage of manufacturing capacity (containment vessels)
3) many reactor technologies that can reduce #1 just haven't been proven to be viable yet(breeder reactors, fast reactors, etc)
I agree objections to any nuclear expansion are just wrong. But we can't just drop any options, because their is clearly no one solution to cover our energy addiction, let alone to get us through the next 20 years.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Informative)
That's correct. The GP's power figures are low by a factor of more than 1,000. The actual worldwide power production in 2007 was about 19,852 TWh. I've seen sources that suggest the 2008 numbers were 30% greater, which would put it just shy of 26,000 TWh.
You'd have to capture as much energy as six continuous hurricanes for an entire year to cover the world's power needs.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Informative)
Am I the only one who gets nervous with this concept?! If the beams are even slightly out you could be frying people rather than generating electricity.
The beams intended to be used are in frequencies that specifically pass through water, since it'll have to pass through a lot of it to get to the surface. Since people are ugly bags of mostly water, they're not going to absorb significant amounts of the radiation.
I really wish people would research this before posting about it. There are some problems with SBSP (like using up a geo slot, or if launch costs are ever going to come down enough to make it economical), but frying people with the beam isn't one of them. I blame Will Wright, who should have known better.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Am I the only one who gets nervous with this concept?! If the beams are even slightly out you could be frying people rather than generating electricity.
No, you're not the only one; that's the first thing everyone thinks. Personally I blame SimCity. Seriously, don't you think the designers of such a system would have considered that possibility and made damn sure to design it so that "frying people" can't possibly happen? Take 30 seconds to do some research [wikipedia.org] on the subject, you'll see that the proposed systems would be unable to fry anyone.
And you just know the control systems will be conficker infected XP machines with direct access to the Internet :(
You're assuming the system safeguards would be implemented in software -- that would be an insanely poor design. In real life, the hardware would be designed such that "frying people" is literally physically impossible, no matter how badly the control software malfunctions.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Informative)
Blah blah blah.
It obviously has nothing to do with the 15-30 year window before you reach 1:1 parity with energy invested::energy harvested.
Because that's a bogus claim that's laughably ridiculous.
Or with the cost of DC transmission.
Because we're not talking about DC transmission. The person you replied to was talking about regional interconnects. People well above this in the story were talking about long-distance DC transmission, which is actually much cheaper/more efficient than AC for long hauls.
Or with the potential impact on the weather.
Because there is none.
You're right, it has to be Big %insert something you hate here%.
You're right - it has to be Imaginary %insert bogus claim here%.
There are much bigger things to worry about at the moment than "Big Coal".
You're right. One of those Big Things is the unsustainable fossil-fuel based energy economy in the US and potential alternative energy sources and distribution systems. Big Coal is just a political roadblock to some of the proposed solutions.