From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 10:03 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
On 11/8/2013 9:11 PM, Chris de Morsella wrote:
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of spudboy...@aol.com
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 5:49 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
If you hold the Rational Optimist view aka Matt Ridley, people will act
altruistic much more, if they get a reward, then in they get jack. >>A
dictatorship of your own preference is suitable for many, but not for most.
Plus, think about pure materiality. If a cruel dictator has his goon point a
semi-automatic at each of our heads and demands of us to immediately produce
an energy source that will power his civilization for the rest of his life,
and unless we can produce this energy source, bang goes the gun. I will
shout shale gas or even tar sands. If you shout out sun and wind, bang goes
the gun against your skull. Why? Because even after decades of work, even
after daily advances, there's no city on earth that is now powered by sun or
win, were that it was so. My point is we cannot legislate reality. I will
take the marketplace with all its flaws versus coercive government. Which
would you choose?
I do not subscribe to your Manichean world view, in fact I find it ill
reflective of the complexity and nuance of reality. You like to see things
in a either this or that kind of way, and maybe that works for you, but it
doesn't work for me.
Are you really that certain you know your energy facts. Global installed
solar consumption went from 2.1 TWh in 2001 to 55.7 TWh in 2011; growing by
a factor of more than 20X in 10years; this is reflected in the growth in
installed capacity, which went from a little over 2GW of installed solar
capacity in 2001 to around 20GW of installed capacity in 2011. In fact there
is so much solar and wind electric capacity already installed in Germany
that on days which are favorable for wind and solar power, the overabundance
of supply can drive the wholesale price into sharply negative territory. The
market inverts and in order to shed load onto the grid - when supply exceeds
demand beyond the capacity of the grid to manage it -- you need to pay the
grid operators because the grid cannot accept any more energy without
becoming unstable - the grid is a balancing between instantaneous supply and
demand (act at the speed of electricity) The cost per kwh of solar PV is
following a Moore's Law type progression in falling costs and the dollar per
kwh of solar PV are closing in on the cost of coal generated electricity,
which has been the least expensive (largely because it can externalize
hundreds of billions of dollars per year of costs incurred by mining, and
burning coal onto the commons).
>> Spudboy is just making a specious argument. Of course no city is powered
entirely by wind or solar - neither of those is consistent enough to depend
on and we haven't developed energy storage technology sufficient to rely on
inconsistent power sources.
In diversity there is stability (usually). Yes solar and wind are
intermittent, but this is an overblown problem and has taken on a rhetorical
life of its own. Yes intermittency is a problem, but there currently exist
may ways of mitigating it.
The grid will need to become smarter - and it is becoming smarter ( a lot of
IT is going into the grid and the billions of nodes that comprise what is
truly the largest machine humankind has ever made). The addition of a
parallel information network that reports real time grid conditions at the
level of individual transformer's operating parameters for example; or real
time measurements of long distance overhead high voltage lines. This will
enable almost instantaneous response times; also a key bit of enabling
technology that is becoming available are very high speed very high voltage
digitally controlled switches that can shunt current from one line to
another in milliseconds or less, transforming the grid into more of a true
network and the power on it will begin to more resemble the packet
architecture of the internet.
Edge intelligence. This includes the smart meters teabaggers have been
taught to fear, but also smart appliances, which will very soon now begin to
roll out. By adding edge intelligence and turning the grid more into a spot
market (or perhaps offering this as an option as opposed to a fixed bill)
and combining the ability of smart appliances to respond to these external
price signals demand will begin to naturally map more closely to supply -
and do so in almost real time.
Better weather prediction (which is happening in part driven by this very
need). This means both better on the longer term scale of weeks and on the
scale of up to the minute updated predictions of near term conditions. This
is especially important for wind, but also for solar. How this helps is by
giving grid operators a lead time in order to spin up standby gas plants for
example - or conversely spin them down; or by allowing the grid operators to
put bids for power delivery up onto the spot markets that already exist.
Demand forwarding, that is consuming energy when it is available - during
periods of surplus supply - in ways that can be used later. This is kind of
like storage I guess. A good example is, to use off peak power to basically
freeze ice that can later be used in HVAC systems thus freeing up peak load
by shifting it to off peak.
Storage. A big time need for this. And a lot of options are beginning to
present themselves. From the large scale pumped storage facilities - an
interesting one in the deserts of southern California that pairs very well
with the big GW scale solar thermal plants being built there. It is a big
facility and pumps a briny ground water it has pumped from a saline aquifer
beneath between a high and a low reservoir, acting like a huge battery. Most
storage capacity that exists in the world is pumped storage, and by far.
An interesting reservoir of potential storage that is beginning to grow of
its own accord is the growing fleet of plugin hybrids and pure electric
vehicles. The aggregate storage capacity of this fleet is beginning to
amount to something and soon if this type of vehicle begins to become more
widely sold - as the price of lithium batteries falls and the industry moves
towards lithium air, or zinc air technologies. These vehicles could - when
linked to the grid, choose to sell some of their reserves of power - based
on the owners power market configurations and estimated requirements the
vehicle could calculate based on its own average daily usage and keeping a
reserve of power. In aggregate millions of electric vehicles intermittently
synching with the grid could provide a substantial storage capacity. Another
very exciting grid scale battery technology is flow batteries, that can be
run in reverse when there is a surplus of power to restore the chemical
potential energy of the batteries fluids. What is interesting for me is that
they can scale to very large capacities simply by adding more tanks to
supply the flow batteries with fresh electrolyte (or run in reverse to
restore the chemical potential consuming electricity)
The electric energy market is complex and as it increasingly becomes a
digital market it will respond much more rapidly to demand and supply
signals - or at least this is the plan. Tens of billions of dollars are
being invested in this transformation of the grid and our energy landscape
from the Victorian era and coal barons like the Koch brothers (who, no
surprises here are major teabagger funders) to the digital age.
As it does make the transformation how we use and how we produce energy is
also going to change, because it has to. We have no choice; we adapt or we
die.
>>I expect that for the forseeable future we will have to use some other
source to supplement wind and solar. But that doesn't mean we have to use
fossil fuel. I think we should be developing some of the safer nuclear
reactor designs such as liquid salt thorium reactors. They fit into the
existing grid structure and even if we install enough wind and solar to
power a city we'll still need backup for windless nights.
Of all the breeder reactor technologies I have looked at LFTR is the best
IMO. For several reasons, including critically that the reprocessing could
be done in small plants on site. The neutron emitting fuel U233 and the
fertile material --Thorium -- that is getting transmuted and breeding more
fuel U233 are both circulating in the liquid fluoride salt solution in which
they are dissolved. The separation can be accomplished by chemical means (no
need for gas diffusion). It seems that these types could also be built
smaller and made safer - in that they would rely on passive safety features
and not go into a meltdown like has happened and is happening in fukushima -
or even critical.
The lead times for any GenIV reactor type - and there are several paper
candidates (but that is all) would be at least thirty years or so. These
things do not exist, except as paper proposals (yes I know about the small
experimental LFTR reactor that was operated - I believe it was a t Oak Ridge
- but that was long ago.)
Might as well talk about orbital solar platforms - and why not - lots of
silicon on the moon. The solar flux at earth is about 1,300 wts/m^2 - in
space the sun would always shine - intermittency would be very low limited
to occasional brief occultation when the platform's transited through the
earth or the moon's shadow, but for a platform in high orbit this would be
pretty rare and very predictable.
My problem with nuclear can be summed up in one word: Fukushima! This global
nuclear disaster is on-going and nobody really knows how to deal with the
corium melt - that has quite possibly totally melted through the reactors of
units #1 and #3. Tepco doesn't even know where the corium is, which is
criminal negligence IMO. That is one hell of a problem.
How to contain corium melt if it has indeed breeched the outer core and is
somewhere melting and diluting into the earth below. How far will it melt
before it becomes too dilute to produce the intense heat (certainly above
2000 degrees C) that the concentrated blob of hot nuclear lava would be at
as it burned its way through the outer reactor wall, and then kept melting
anything that touched it. How far will it spread out into rivulets? What
about the ground water?
This is a mega problem and anyone who pretends otherwise is asleep at the
wheel.
I realize LFTR is very different from these Mark II (crappy designs from the
beginning - in fact some of the chief engineers on the project resigned
rather than have their names associated with the Mark II) but it is not
without issues. U233 is nasty stuff - in fact that is one of the very
reasons it is less of a proliferation risk. For example though Plutonium is
a very deadly radioactive poison - it is so only after it gets into your
body - in theory - don't try this LOL - one could lay down and sleep all
night next to some plutonium wrapped up even in something as thin as a piece
of paper. Try that with a little lump of U233 and you would be dead. U233
can in theory make a nuclear device it is a copious neutron producer. Anyone
handling it would be dead, but fanatics might not care.
No one is going to weaponize a solar panel; and in my way of seeing things
that is a distinct virtue.
Chris
Brent
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