Al Gore & Guy Dauncey's Energy Challenge to the World

Our "pub" where you can post about things completely Off Topic or about non-silent PC issues.

Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Wed Jul 30, 2008 4:09 am

Bluefront wrote:...
And you're now admitting that Gore's 10-year plan is unrealistic, as well as having a certainty of a massive cost over-run. The 420 billion, could turn into 420 trillion. What's next?
.....
As much money as we give to Halliburton? Geez, a 1000 fold increase, that makes the national debt look like a drop in the bucket. It's a good thing you learned your lesson about over-generalizing. Now if only you would take a math class.

How many would divert part of that 420 trillion to having you buy a clue?

And even better, why won't you over-generalize over on the list of proven dirtbags thread? Does your absence denote concurrence? I'll wait while you try to figure out what that means.

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Wed Jul 30, 2008 5:38 pm

Bluefront wrote:Neil.....you keep forgetting that the USA is sitting on vast amounts of untapped oil, and known amounts of coal that could last a thousand years. It's simply a matter of having the political will to change the regulations that keep us energy-starved.
Ask anyone who lives in Texas what will happen with yet another coal plant to the standard of living there. Ask any town in Canada that's down river of a shale-oil processing plant what new health problems the town is having.

And yet the simpleton continues to cling to ignorance, his one and only friend.

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Wed Jul 30, 2008 5:58 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hi,

Another point: why do T. Boone Pickens (oil man who financed the Swift Boaters) and Al Gore agree on this?
Well the really interesting thing about T Boone is that he pulled a Warren Buffet of his own and dropped a huge amount of money on Swift Vets and POWs for Truth to make sure John Kerry didn't get elected. Now the neocons screamed when Buffet made donations to oust W, but it was OK when Boone did, more of that double standard that goes with being so ethical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets ... _for_Truth

This group, which should also go under the great example of ethics thread, outdid the Russians with pure propaganda. How much did they lie to get W elected? How ugly and unethical was their smear campaign?

"Among the first to criticize this ad was Republican Senator John McCain, a Bush supporter, Vietnam veteran, and former POW. He said, "I condemn the [SBVT] ad. It is dishonest and dishonorable. I think it is very, very wrong".[27]

[27]^ a b "Morning Show Wrap", ABC News (2004-08-06). Retrieved on 2007-03-28.

That [27] BF, that's a reference numbers to citing works, AKA substantiated facts, a whole new concept for you. Try it sometime, God forbid, you may for once sound intelligent.

But anyways it's good to see that McCain has something that nobody in the current adminstration has; an ethical bone in his body. Of course when dealing with issues such as ethical bones he really could not have fewer than Bush/Cheney, because of simple physics. Zero is the fewest number of ethical bones a person can have. Although if one could run up a tab and deficit I'm sure the puppet and the task masker would have found a way.

croddie
Posts: 541
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2004 8:52 pm

Post by croddie » Wed Jul 30, 2008 6:53 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote: Where does the radioactive waste get stored? If they ever approve Yucca Mountain, then it will be filled up, and they'll have to look another 50 years to find a secure place.

And, they'll have to monitor Yucca Mountain for, oh about 50,000 years?! That should be cheap enough!
...
My guess of 500 billion is probably too low, you're right. But whatever the cost is, it would be a lot less than what we already spend on energy. Buying oil that just goes away when you use it -- or invest in a system that can provide energy for years to come.

I know which one I would rather spend money on.
Hello Mr. Blanchard. I don't think you understand interest rates.
Monitoring Yucca mountain for 50000 years is not expensive.
Take the running costs of monitoring for 1 year and multiply by 1/(interest rate-inflation rate) to approximate it. Maybe 1/(5%-2%)=33.
The future is cheap. Put $1 in the bank, at 3% interest (inflation adjusted) in 1000 years it will be $7 trillion in today's terms, you can pay 10 million people a reasonable salary to jump up and down on Yucca Mountain in perpetuity.

Any capital investment can be similarly rewritten as an annual cost and the costs of renewable and carbon energy are expressed in the same terms when they are compared, and renewable is more expensive, although becoming more competitive. (If it were not so we would see large-scale unsubsidized use of renewables.) The huge amount of money the US spends on oil would be less than what would have to be spent on renewable energy.

However I think heavy government and private investment in R&D and large-scale conversion to renewables over a longer time frame than 10 years would make a lot of economic sense.
Last edited by croddie on Wed Jul 30, 2008 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

mattthemuppet
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 618
Joined: Mon May 23, 2005 7:05 am
Location: State College, PA

Post by mattthemuppet » Wed Jul 30, 2008 7:43 pm

Neil, I've got to say, shouting something over and over again isn't going to convince people of your point of view, especially people like Bluefront who paint everything they don't like/ agree with as Liberal for some reason.

as for Al Gore, he's got people thinking, though arguably most of those are people who would be thinking along those lines anyway (they're probably all Liberals too, *cough*spit*). Plus, the doubling of oil prices in the last year would have got the rest thinking anyway.

As for renewables, here's my take:
1) they're expensive, AFAIK, universally so, compared with gas and coal fired power generation
2) solar thermal is cheaper and more efficient than PV, which is really only suited to industrial scale plants. Personal PV panels, at current prices and efficiency, are pretty pointless, even before you take into account the enormous amount of energy required to make them.
3) wind and hydro are great, but massively terrain dependent. New Zealand produces the majority of it's power (~80-90% I think) from wind and hydro, but that's largely because it's a very windy hilly place. I like wind turbines, but alot of them do produce very low freq. noise that can be structurally damaging to houses.
4) wave power would be great, but it's been touted as the NBT (next big thing) for years and hasn't done anything.

For non-renewables:
1) coal and gas are cheap, but that's before any costs from future carbon trading is factored in. That may be one of the drivers of increased renewable energy production.
2) nuclear, hmm. Taking into account commissioning (they do have regulations for a reason Bluefront, not just because they're scummy Liberals, remember Long Island?) and decommissioning costs it's hard to see it competing on cost, but it would work as a base power source. As for firing waste nuclear material up into space, have you ever seen how regularly Arianne et al rockets blow up? I can't imagine occasionally spreading nuclear waste around the upper atmosphere being a palatable disposal solution.

How about another slant - reduce consumption. Don't buy enormous TVs, buy smaller cars, insulate your house properly + turn the thermostat down a smidge, take shorter showers, wash on the cold cycle, buy CFLs, switch off stuff that's not being used, go for a walk at the weekend instead of a drive, dry your clothes outside in summer etc etc. All those things will produce small, largely innocuous, savings that add up to a considerable saving without having a large impact on your quality of life.

That's how I see things - we're not going to be off fossil fuels for some time, simply because they're a very cheap, portable and useable form of energy (try reading about storing liquid H2), but there's a whole stack of stuff from increasing renewable energy production to changing patterns of consumption that will make a big difference. Not so great at grabbing headlines or getting me elected (oh well), but a little closer to reality.

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:09 am

wind turbines, but alot of them do produce very low freq. noise that can be structurally damaging to houses.
do you have any actual examples where this has happened, and turbine noise has been definitively identified as the culprit? hard to believe unless the freq. is a resonant frequency of the house structure, which is a bit unlikely.
As for firing waste nuclear material up into space, have you ever seen how regularly Arianne et al rockets blow up?
not only is it not safe, it is also a waste of fuel that could be used in fast reactors.
How about another slant - reduce consumption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negawatt

this is why some utilities give people rebates/credits for installing home insulation etc. it's cheaper than adding new capacity.

nutball
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 1304
Joined: Thu Apr 10, 2003 7:16 am
Location: en.gb.uk

Post by nutball » Thu Jul 31, 2008 12:40 am

mattthemuppet wrote:As for firing waste nuclear material up into space, have you ever seen how regularly Arianne et al rockets blow up? I can't imagine occasionally spreading nuclear waste around the upper atmosphere being a palatable disposal solution.
It's not beyond the wit of man to design and build a container which could withstand such an accident.

Were you aware that radioactive material is routinely used as a power-source for certain classes of spacecraft, and launched on rockets?

Bluefront
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 5316
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2003 2:19 pm
Location: St Louis (county) Missouri USA

Post by Bluefront » Thu Jul 31, 2008 3:26 am

I'm always amused by discussions of this sort....and many of the proposals. There are radio talk shows around here frequently on this very subject. One amusing energy solution I heard the other day......dam the Mississippi, turning that river into a massive hydro-electric plant. Similar to what China has been doing I guess. The caller referred to the river as "wasted energy just flowing into the ocean".

Of course the wag had no answer to the collateral effects of such a project. When pressed further he said he really didn't mean to produce electrical energy, just a bunch of water-wheels turning shafts to run machinery(?). Nice... maybe he and Gore should team up for a new book. :lol:

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Thu Jul 31, 2008 4:00 am

And so once again one ignorant person on the opposing argument means everyone on the opposing argument is ignorant, what other reason to even bring this up? What a sad example of logic.

You and that wag have a lot in common, you just don't know it.

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:42 am

Were you aware that radioactive material is routinely used as a power-source for certain classes of spacecraft, and launched on rockets?
of course, in RTG's. however for those we are talking a couple of kg of plutonium at most; even if they did explode you would probably get no more exposure than on the average long-haul flight. the global high-level radwaste stockpile is orders of magnitude larger, and for it to be even remotely feasible/economical quite a lot of radwaste would have to go up on each rocket.

For Americans the Hoover Dam, as well as being a massive engineering achievement, is a good example of a successful hydroelectricity project.

brainykid
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:01 pm
Location: The cosmos

Post by brainykid » Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:58 am

Rod Adams wrote:One of my frequent frustrations is getting involved in an energy policy discussion with someone that goes something like this:

Them: I am deeply concerned about global climate change and the effects of mankind’s continued use of dirty fossil fuels on our planet’s health.
Me: I used to operate power plants that produced zero emissions. What do you think about taking a new look at using nuclear power to replace fossil fuel consumption?
Them: I do not like nuclear power. We can get all the power that we need by conservation, wind, solar and biomass.
Me: How do you expect for windmills and solar panels to produce power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining? Can you really shut down fossil plants if you build wind turbines and put solar panels on buildings?
Them: No, but the grid can provide all the back-up we need. We already have paid for building the existing plants and should not spend any money on building new ones while we transition to a new economy where we can live within our natural energy income.
Me: But that means that we have to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels when we could be building plants that make them unnecessary.
Them: I do not like nuclear power and do not want to replace one poison with another.
Sound familiar?

Nuclear power is clean and takes minimal land to take advantage of, unlike wind which must be placed on huge "wind farms". Think about it, a huge number of wind and solar farms, or a relatively small number of nuclear plants. Nuclear is far more reliable than any wind or solar, and their fuel only needs to be replaced every 18-24 months...

JUST STOP CONCOCTING WORST CASE SCENARIOS CONCERNING ITS NUCLEAR WASTE ! ! !

Or is this just typical Liberal behavior?

Ahem, [thumbs under suspenders] I think that we are smarter than this, and if we could only just look for a solution to storing/destroying nuclear waste...

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Thu Jul 31, 2008 1:17 pm

if we could only just look for a solution to storing/destroying nuclear waste...
that solution already exists, in the form of fast breeder reactors. however there is not a single proposal to construct a commercial FBR anywhere in the world, you may well ask yourself why that is.

mattthemuppet
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 618
Joined: Mon May 23, 2005 7:05 am
Location: State College, PA

Post by mattthemuppet » Thu Jul 31, 2008 4:32 pm

jaganath wrote:
wind turbines, but alot of them do produce very low freq. noise that can be structurally damaging to houses.
do you have any actual examples where this has happened, and turbine noise has been definitively identified as the culprit? hard to believe unless the freq. is a resonant frequency of the house structure, which is a bit unlikely.
only a couple of cases outside Palmerston North where I lived for a year - they have one of (if not the) largest wind farms in the southern hemisphere - and a couple of the new enormous turbines were built within the minimum distance (3km I think) of existing houses. A couple of those houses then developed cracks in the walls. Then again, Kiwi houses are little better than sheds, so it could have been due to a mild breeze :)
nutball wrote: It's not beyond the wit of man to design and build a container which could withstand such an accident.

Were you aware that radioactive material is routinely used as a power-source for certain classes of spacecraft, and launched on rockets?
have you seen the kind of containers that radioactive waste is stored in when not fired up into space? They're enormous. I sure we could design a container that would contain radioactive waste in the event of a rocket explosion, possible air ablation and then impact with the ground/ water but I'd wager it'd be uneconomical/ unfeasible for a rocket to lift it with a useful amount of waste inside. Besides, dumping in space is already becoming the next dumping in sea - for years we assumed that we could dump as much as we like in the sea wihtout any effect, now that's patently not the case. Now the same is happening in near orbit and further out - there's so much junk and debris up there it's starting to cause problems for satellites. Further adding to that because we won't deal with the problem on earth doesn't make much sense.

brainykid
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:01 pm
Location: The cosmos

Post by brainykid » Thu Jul 31, 2008 6:42 pm

mattthemuppet wrote:Besides, dumping in space is already becoming the next dumping in sea -
No-one said anything about dumping it in space. The proposed plan was to launch it into space and steer it in the direction of the sun, and leave it at that. I don't think sun's inhabitants would greatly object...

mattthemuppet
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 618
Joined: Mon May 23, 2005 7:05 am
Location: State College, PA

Post by mattthemuppet » Thu Jul 31, 2008 7:58 pm

brainykid wrote:
mattthemuppet wrote:Besides, dumping in space is already becoming the next dumping in sea -
No-one said anything about dumping it in space. The proposed plan was to launch it into space and steer it in the direction of the sun, and leave it at that. I don't think sun's inhabitants would greatly object...
sure, though I don't think it's quite so trivial as firing it at the sun + hoping :) I'm sure NASA would welcome the work though - instead of spending $100m's sending probes to study the sun, they could just fire radioactive waste at it and leave it at that.

sea2stars
Patron of SPCR
Posts: 167
Joined: Fri Sep 01, 2006 4:04 pm

Post by sea2stars » Thu Jul 31, 2008 9:22 pm


nutball
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 1304
Joined: Thu Apr 10, 2003 7:16 am
Location: en.gb.uk

Post by nutball » Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:12 pm

mattthemuppet wrote:have you seen the kind of containers that radioactive waste is stored in when not fired up into space? They're enormous.
Sure. Have you seen the size of a Proton rocket? Or an Ariane 5, or Ares V for that matter? They are rather large and can lift quite a lot of mass.
I sure we could design a container that would contain radioactive waste in the event of a rocket explosion, possible air ablation and then impact with the ground/ water but I'd wager it'd be uneconomical/ unfeasible for a rocket to lift it with a useful amount of waste inside.
Well run the numbers and get back to us!

mattthemuppet
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 618
Joined: Mon May 23, 2005 7:05 am
Location: State College, PA

Post by mattthemuppet » Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:20 pm

nutball wrote:
mattthemuppet wrote:have you seen the kind of containers that radioactive waste is stored in when not fired up into space? They're enormous.
Sure. Have you seen the size of a Proton rocket? Or an Ariane 5, or Ares V for that matter? They are rather large and can lift quite a lot of mass.
I sure we could design a container that would contain radioactive waste in the event of a rocket explosion, possible air ablation and then impact with the ground/ water but I'd wager it'd be uneconomical/ unfeasible for a rocket to lift it with a useful amount of waste inside.
Well run the numbers and get back to us!
I have actually - visited the ESA centre in Kourou, French Guiana and saw an Ariane 4 lift off (an Ariane 5 exploded out to sea a few weeks before, so they canned that launch) - most impressive thing I've ever seen or heard.

They do seem to carry a surprisingly large payload - see - so I guess it would be possible. I'd also guess that given that the US is contemplating spending billions on Yucca Mountain that there might be a reason why it hasn't been used. But hey, I'm no rocket scientist (as us biologists love to say) :)

hawkeye1
Patron of SPCR
Posts: 62
Joined: Sun Mar 02, 2003 1:40 am
Location: Misawa Air Base, Japan (APO AP)

Post by hawkeye1 » Fri Aug 01, 2008 1:29 am

That this idiot has any platform to spew his radical and impractical ideas is symptomatic of what is wrong with the MSM media today. I can't believe there's one serious person who thinks this has even one iota of a chance of implementation without ruining the U.S. economy and bringing our downfall from within. Oh, wait, Al's a democrat, and both of those goals have been in their sights since the end of WWII, haven't they? Well, congrats Al, you may get your wish after all (second after being president, of course, sore loser).

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Fri Aug 01, 2008 2:35 am

brainykid wrote:No-one said anything about dumping it in space. The proposed plan was to launch it into space and steer it in the direction of the sun, and leave it at that. I don't think sun's inhabitants would greatly object...
more on waste into space:

http://yarchive.net/space/science/nuke_waste.html
You don't want to send it into the sun. You want to do almost anything else: put it in high Earth orbit, land it or crash it on the moon, put it in Solar orbit, say between Earth and Venus, crash it into Venus or Jupiter, or send it out of the Solar system on an escape trajectory, in roughly increasing order of delta-V required. Even sending it out of the
solar system takes only about half the delta_V of crashing it into the Sun.
Well run the numbers and get back to us!
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/28 ... nto-space/
What about nuclear waste? A nuclear reactor releases about 25-30 tonnes of spent fuel every year. With our dream budget of $1,000/kg, that would cost about $25 million to launch a single reactor's waste into orbit. According to Wikipedia, there are 63 operating reactors in the US, so it would cost about $1.6 billion/year to dispose of the nuclear waste generated.

It's been estimated that Yucca Mountain - the United State's current plan to store nuclear waste - will cost about $58 billion to store waste over the course of 100 years. So storing waste in Yucca Mountain will cost about 1/3rd the price of launching that material into space. Not to mention the terrible risk of launching rockets full of nuclear waste into space - imagine what might happen if a rocket exploded in mid-flight…
hawkeye1, please do not turn this into some tedious partisan diatribe. given the tremendous national debt the current president has run up, if anyone is trying to bring down the US from within it's the GOP.

croddie
Posts: 541
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2004 8:52 pm

Post by croddie » Fri Aug 01, 2008 5:50 am

You are very right on the crazy space idea, but one can't help noticing:
jaganath wrote:hawkeye1, please do not turn this into some tedious partisan diatribe. given the tremendous national debt the current president has run up, if anyone is trying to bring down the US from within it's the GOP.
:oops:

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:51 am

yes, I realise that last comment may have seemed hypocritical, however all I meant to show by that was that each side has accusations that they can level at each other until the cows come home, to no obvious or productive end. I can't exactly forbid people from bringing up politics, but rarely does it produce an enlightening discussion, in fact 9 times out of a 10 it deteriorates into a simple mud-slinging match (between **u***o** and *r***i***) so best to pre-emptively nip it in the bud, as it were.

*EDIT* advance in solar energy storage touted:

http://www.physorg.com/news136738014.html

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Fri Aug 01, 2008 3:03 pm

jaganath wrote:hawkeye1, please do not turn this into some tedious partisan diatribe. given the tremendous national debt the current president has run up, if anyone is trying to bring down the US from within it's the GOP.
It's good to see:

1. Someone noticed.
2. Someone speaking facts.
3. Someone realizing that it doesn't matter what party the slime ball is in.

Jaganath - not a sheeple.

NeilBlanchard
Moderator
Posts: 7681
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2002 7:11 pm
Location: Maynard, MA, Eaarth
Contact:

Major discovery from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution

Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Aug 01, 2008 7:34 pm

Hi y'all,

This is near 100% efficient way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, at room temperatures!

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html
http://www.physorg.com/news136738014.html

Another similar development:

http://www.pureenergysystems.com/news/2 ... index.html

qviri
Posts: 2465
Joined: Tue May 24, 2005 8:22 pm
Location: Berlin
Contact:

Post by qviri » Sat Aug 02, 2008 12:05 am

brainykid wrote:
Rod Adams wrote:Me: How do you expect for windmills and solar panels to produce power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining?
Ah, strawman.

There are indeed times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Similarly, there are times when one is not near an electrical outlet, and wishes to use a portable electronics device, say a cellular phone.

One could conceivably use a device that would be able to draw energy from an electrical outlet when you are near one, and return energy when you are not near one. In common parlance such a device is called a "battery".

Energy storage is a fairly common phenomenon. Batteries of all shapes and capacities store electrical energy received from an electrical generator for a few days or years. The human body stores energy in fat cells after meals. Coal, natural gas, and oil store energy received from the Sun thousands of years ago.

While there are times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, there are very few times when gravity is not acting on everything on the surface of the earth.

Provided that the amount of energy that can be collected when the sun is shining (high part of the cycle, if you will) is enough to cover a bit less than twice the anticipated usage over the entire cycle (starting when the sun starts shining, and ending when the sun starts shining again after not shining for a while), it is, indeed, possible to supply a constant amount of energy throughout the cycle. Although the traditional kinds of electrical batteries are fairly unpractical for higher amounts of energy to be stored, energy can be converted to other types.

Consider, for example, a large container of a liquid, situated near an elevation difference. Experience with exisiting generating stations located at dams (for example, the Hoover Dam brought up earlier in this thread) suggests that once water (a liquid) is at a higher elevation, it is possible to generate energy in the form of electricity using this elevation difference. Further experience with pumps such as the ones that allow people living in skyscrapers to have water flowing from their taps tells us that it is possible to use mechanical energy to move water to a higher elevation.

What if, then, we used energy when it is available to move a liquid to a higher elevation, then return it to a lower elevation to generate energy when the natural source is not providing its energy? This process is fairly similar to charging a battery in a cellular phone and then being able to use it when we are not near a source of electrical power.

Let us assume that the operation of such a system is about 75% efficient. (Literature suggests efficiencies of around 70-85%; I am assuming the lower end of the scale for the sake of the argument, though it could surely be at or near the high end if necessary.) Because we would still need to provide energy during both part of the cycle in addition to storing the energy to be provided during the low part of the cycle, we need the energy produced during the high part of the cycle to be 0.5 + 0.5 * (1 / 0.75) = 1.17 of the energy we aim to provide over the entire cycle. Even if our storage method was only 33% efficient, we would still need only twice the energy to be used for the whole cycle.

Should we decide to put this idea to use, interesting opportunities arise. For instance, using a covered or closed system rather than one in which the liquid is exposed to the atmosphere would reduce the evaporation losses and improve on the 75% efficiency figure I've used. Using a liquid denser than water would reduce the volume of liquid required to store the required amount of energy, though perhaps at a cost of lower pumping efficiency if the denser liquid is also more viscous. If using wind power, one could use the mechanical energy of rotating blades directly to pump water without the use of an intermediate form of energy such as electricity.

Of course, just as with different types and sizes of batteries, pumped water is not the only form in which energy can be stored. If acceptable insulation is used, energy could be stored in a material in the form of heat and removed later on. Mechanical energy can be stored using the inertial effects associated with a flywheel, although eliminating friction to a sufficient degree is non-trivial.

We see, then, that energy from intermittent natural sources such as solar irradiation and wind can be stored when it's available to be used up when it isn't; essentially invalidating the argument at hand regarding the continued dependency on traditional power sources.

jaganath
Posts: 5085
Joined: Tue Sep 20, 2005 6:55 am
Location: UK

Post by jaganath » Sat Aug 02, 2008 1:49 am

you know, I had a bizarre idea where you could store energy from an intermittent source by lifting up big rocks on a conveyor belt, and then using the "down" conveyor belt to turn a generator etc. of course it's a bit hard to find thousands of big rocks that are uniform in size and weight, but still, it appeals to me as a kind of "Rube Goldberg" contraption....

NeilBlanchard
Moderator
Posts: 7681
Joined: Mon Dec 09, 2002 7:11 pm
Location: Maynard, MA, Eaarth
Contact:

Post by NeilBlanchard » Sat Aug 02, 2008 2:54 am

Hi,

There are several things that can mitigate the storage issue:

Collect wind and solar from over a wide area, and distribute it efficiently. Especially for wind, this can work very well. Don't forget that the USA has 3 time zones -- the sunshine is "expanded" by 6 hours for any given location. The high voltage DC transmission lines have just 10% losses.

store the energy as: hydrogen (see my post above), as compressed air underground (see the Scientific American plan), as heat (see the United Technologies molten salt) -- there are many things that can work

Use other renewable energy sources too: geothermal is constant, as is wave power, and biomass is a fuel that can be stored.

Do you think that no one ever thought of this? A/C is our largest use of electricity, and if the sun is shining when it is hot, then there will be electricity...plus, we could have much more efficient buildings and A/C systems!
Last edited by NeilBlanchard on Sat Aug 02, 2008 4:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Bluefront
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 5316
Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2003 2:19 pm
Location: St Louis (county) Missouri USA

Post by Bluefront » Sat Aug 02, 2008 3:18 am

It sure is easy to dream up all sorts of ways to store energy, when using an intermittent source for your power. Some ways work well and have been used successfully for years. Batteries are probably the most common, and the most portable......which is a major concern.

Just how does Gore and company propose to replace batteries.....which are very bad from a "green" view?

Our entire electrical grid is in place, tested, and working successfully right now. It simply needs to be improved to meet future needs. Nuclear will do it..... other solutions might, might not.

aristide1
*Lifetime Patron*
Posts: 4284
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:21 pm
Location: Undisclosed but sober in US

Post by aristide1 » Sat Aug 02, 2008 9:24 am

Hydrogen is a storage medium.

I'll refrain from saying DUH!

Oooops.

:lol:

Besides any building that generates its own power has less a requirement for power lines, thereby reducing the need for more of them, which are met with resistance by everyone who believes their views will be compromised. IE the "not in my backyard syndrome", just like nuclear.
jaganath wrote:you know, I had a bizarre idea where you could store energy from an intermittent source by lifting up big rocks on a conveyor belt, and then using the "down" conveyor belt to turn a generator etc. of course it's a bit hard to find thousands of big rocks that are uniform in size and weight, but still, it appeals to me as a kind of "Rube Goldberg" contraption....
This is not bizarre idea, and it is being used today. In one situation a power plant along a river pumps water up a mountain to a massive storage facitlity. During the day the water is released, like in a damn, to create the additional energy required during daytime, or more specifically, first shift requirements.

One could argue of the losses of pumping uphill and added generator loses, but if the electicity was not in use anyway........

And so each solution is going to depend on what's available, tailored to the specific region and requirements. Not the gross over simplified inaccurate generalizations that repeat here with OJ Simpson redundancy.

brainykid
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:01 pm
Location: The cosmos

Post by brainykid » Sat Aug 02, 2008 6:05 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote: Do you think that no one ever thought of this? A/C is our largest use of electricity, and if the sun is shining when it is hot, then there will be electricity...plus, we could have much more efficient buildings and A/C systems!
How original... Actually I have never thought of this, but it does seem a shame that AC is not our only use of electricity... In which case this theory would work.

Concerning batteries:

Using batteries is hardly a viable solution to storing energy because:
1 Anyone remember memory effects?
2 They are very expensive

Nuclear power is:
1 clean, producing ZERO "greenhouse" emissions
2 Can provide 100% of our power needs
3 Can provide power 100% of the time, not just when we are using AC
4 Nuclear plants can be built anywhere

Post Reply