Google Files First Solar Patent, Builds R&D Team 118
bizwriter writes "Google has moved beyond investing and using solar power and has started on serious R&D work in the field. Its first patent application in solar energy technology just became public, and the company is staffing a new R&D group 'to develop electricity from renewable energy sources at a cost less than coal' at 'utility scale.'"
Re:Evil (Score:4, Interesting)
IP patents may be an oxymoron, I agree. But what they do with a patent is the salient part. Squash competition, or donate it to some patent freedom pool? I'll await further details.
Re:Evil (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that if you read the patent application, it should be shot down. The patent essentially claims "use a camera protected from heat and some image processing software to feed a control system with inputs to control heliostat mirrors to get an optimal image."
There is absolutely nothing novel about that concept, unless they are using a novel method of image processing (which the claims do not appear to indicate; they talk about "measuring bright spots" which is all a camera can do in the first place) or a novel method of keeping the camera cool (which the claims also do not indicate).
Linking image processing to a control system has already been done, and just because it hasn't been done "for a heliostat" doesn't make it novel. So I would argue that this is indeed just the type of patent that should not be allowed.
Re:What a waste. (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me start you off with this [youtube.com]. Tell me when you see the whole US clouded over.
A particular Ohio city is not an island (btw, there has never been a time in recorded history when a city in Ohio has had only five days of sun in 2 months). Ohio is connected on a grid to the rest of the country. The regional grids are increasingly being connected over longer and longer distances by high power runs. It doesn't matter if your particular area is cloudy, because somewhere else isn't.
A single wind or solar plant has a lot of randomness. A large number of them, spread out over a large region, have very little randomness. Also, FYI, but the time a power plant is down for is already built into its cost equation. That's known as the "capacity factor", and is a key element in economics planning for power plants.
Secondly, the grid *already* has to handle fluctuations. Not only fluctuations in supply -- yes, conventional power plants go down too, both for maintenance and for unexpected failures -- but even moreso due to demand. Demand fluctuates wildly, and a demand fluctuation is no different than a supply fluctuation. We deal with this by having "peakers" available. These are power plants that can rapidly scale their production up or down depending on the needs of the grid. One of the great things about solar thermal is that it basically comes with a built-in "peaker"; all you need is a natural gas burner, and you've got your backup at almost no extra charge. The turbines are already there, the transmission, etc.
Beyond all of that, please read the bullet points at the bottom of my last note.
Re:What a waste. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't really think you've addressed my questions:
That video you linked routinely shows anywhere from 25% to 50% of the US under clouds at the same time - that's a pretty big drop in supply.
"A particular Ohio city is not an island (btw, there has never been a time in recorded history when a city in Ohio has had only five days of sun in 2 months)."
Huh. Go look at the statistic for April and May of this year that we just got off of. Maybe 5 days isn't exactly the right number, maybe it's 10. The point is, it was cloudy and rainy for virtually the entire months of April AND May. I know because I just lived through it.
Yes, a city isn't an island, it's attached to the grid.
Are you suggesting that some areas of the country will purchase capacity and be producing on the order of 100% more energy capacity than they would be expecting to use (e.g. if most of the East Coast is seriously underpowered because virtually everything from Mississippi to Main is under a giant storm system for most of a day)?
You seem to be saying that shipping very large amounts of power across very large distances will not be a problem? I know that advances are being made in superconductors and HVDC lines to reduce losses when transmitting power long distances, but again, if you have several days in a row where a large portion of the country are only producing 10% or 30% of the power they need, that seems like setting the stage for problems.
Natural gas has has limited supply and is pretty expensive (we're in a period where, from what I've seen, NatGas prices have come down a fair amount, because of an explosion of Shale Gas drilling. That may last us a few decades (The Gas Industry Marketers like to proclaim we have 100 years of gas to produce; if you look into the numbers, that's actually about 80 years at current levels of consumption - but we are starting to increase Gas exports to places like China, we are talking about building new Gas power plants, using Gas to supplement Wind and Solar, and even use Gas for transportation - if we try to do all those things, that 80 year supply of gas could become 40 years).
I think we need to think long term. I'm not convinced we can rely on "cheap natural gas" for centuries.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think that solar and wind can, and will play a significant role in our energy mix in the future. I just have not seen a good, strong argument that convinces me that you can reach that 80-100% level.
I see more of a future where Solar and Wind might provide around 40-50%, with a little gas and coal (hopefully CCS coal) maybe being around 10%, and safer nuclear for the other 40-50%.
I don't really like our current Light Water Reactor technology, but I'm pretty optimistic about the potential for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor [energyfromthorium.com].
The short description of the LFTR is that it can burn off the waste from our current nuclear reactors, reducing that waste from a 200,000 year problem to a 200 year problem. We *really* need to burn off our waste anyhow, so if for NO OTHER REASON, we need to investigate doing this.
It uses Thorium as the primary fuel, which is about 5X more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium (every State in the USA has Thorium, pretty much every country has Thorium). But here's the kicker - you need about 1/200 the Thorium as you do Uranium for a nuclear reactor of equivalent output. This means much less mining, and much less waste.
With Thorium reactors, a few mines could power the entire country - it should only take one or two tons of Thorium per year to run a reactor - 1 ton Thorium yields roughly a GW-Year of electrical power.
So, if we want to generate 200GW per year, we need about 200 tons of Thorium per year - that doesn't sound like very much, compared to the millions of tons of coal a year that we need.
Finally, the reactor design has several characteristics which should make much safer than LWRs (although LWRs aren't terribly dangerou