Renewable things
Aug. 31st, 2005 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIn honor of the price of gas bravely crusading beyond $70 a barrel, I thought it was time to add some commentary of my own about possible answers for the future. After all, everyone who's everyone is talking about renewable energy sources these days. Why not me?
Mostly it's because I feel like being a pompous ass educational type and preaching to people.
So, what kind of power sources are we talking about around here? Not vehicle fuels, but sources of electricity? After all, if we could have limitless electricity we could do away with the demand for heating fuel, for oil-fired power, and possibly the need for a number of other fossil fuels that we use. But what renewable sources are there? Here are some of the big names you might have heard:
Wind
Benefits:
Wind is cheap. Actually, it's free. All you need is reasonably nice terrain and a weather system that blows more the the Eye of Argon. Then all you have to do is construct a field of giant windmills and keep an eye on them and they generate power all by themselves. Plus, you can never run out of it; the amount of windmills that you would need to seriously deplete a wind front would be staggering. It's cheap, it's easy, what else can you say?
Drawbacks:
Wind is terrain limited. Extremely terrain limited. It needs a constant source of wind, and we're not talking about the "blow the roof off the Superdome" Katrina type winds either. No, you need something nice and gentle that blows all year round. Too much wind and you're going to have pieces of a giant propeller going knifing through the air at sixty miles an hour. Too little and you might as well be selling air conditioners in Eskimo country. There are very few places in the world where you have open terrain capable of sustaining a wind farm, and most of them have cities already nearby.
There are also other problems. Recently one of the country's most spectacular windfarms, the one outside San Jose California, got taken under fire from Environmentalists for the damage the unshielded propellers do to endangered birds. The farm requires maintenance too, and the maintenance crew has to haul ass all over several square miles of turning windmills just to give everything a check up. Wind is great and all, but it's certainly not for everyone.
Hydroelectric
Benefits:
Hydroelectric was the original clean energy source. People have been using waterwheels in industrial applications since we invented industry. Recently they've been able to capture the gravitational potential energy of water sources and turn it into electricity. You can use small power plants on smaller, swift-flowing mountain streams to generate local power, and massive hydroelectric power plants to generate huge amounts of power, and store water for thirsty cities. What's not to like?
Drawbacks:
Hydroelectric power is also terrain limited. In order to use a waterwheel/impeller type setup you need swift moving water. We're talking world sprinting championship, sweep you off your feet and throw you off a hundred meter cliff type water here. That type of flow is usually only found in mountainous terrain, which means that producing power in the middle of Iowa is a big no-no. Plus, if you want a dam, you need fairly mountainous terrain for this to work at all, and for you to actually be able to generate energy via flowing water.
Plus, it's either not very efficient, or very beneficial. It's not efficient at the moment to litter the rivers with small power plants. Much better is the idea of building huge dams. But, as people have noticed throughout the years, blocking off large valleys to build giant lakes tends to reduce hundreds of square miles of prime recreation area into a different sort of recreation area. This makes the environmentalists, the hikers, and those people who had the misfortune to be living in the area that is now underwater, rather unhappy.
Plus, it's dangerous as hell if the dam breaks. China's Three Gorges Dam is an excellent example of this. If it ever breaks, the tidal wave will make the Christmas Tsunami look like a ripple in a kid's pond, and it will be traveling, not over the ocean, but straight through some of China's most developed territory. Huge hydroelectric projects are big, they take forever to build, they destroy a lot of territory, and God help you if they ever break.
Nuclear Fusion
Benefits:
This is the energy of the future. It's fairly clean, it never experiences a meltdown, and the fuel for operation is one of the most plentiful in the galaxy. Although not truly a renewable resource, there's enough fuel in Jupiter to run us a good long time. In a way, it is the centerpiece of the hydrogen economy you heard about, capable of producing vast amounts of electricity at the highest possible efficiency (sans a direct antimatter converter). Miniaturized fusion technology will supply power to deep-space craft, underground colonies, and every other place we can dream of going to.
Drawbacks:
This dog don't hunt. Nobody has been able to generate what is essentially a small star within the confines of a man-made reactor without losing more energy than they gain. It's a technical issue by now, but it's a technical issue that is proving remarkably resilient to conventional solutions-or so say the plasma physicists. And nobody understands them anyway.
Plus, we haven't even tested the real deal yet. Fusion, like it occurs in the sun, involves the collision of four protons (Hydrogen nuclei) into one molecule of Helium. We're decades away from even trying that. Modern fusion research is working on colliding Hydrogen's two heavier isotopes, deuterium and tritium, together to make Helium. Deuterium-tritium fusion creates more radioactive byproduct, is more expensive, and is resource limited. Tritium in particular is extremely rare, there's not actually that much of it around. Hydrogen-hydrogen fusion is the stuff of dreams, and we aren't even close to that, or the legendary Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen cycle.
Solar Power
Benefits:
If anything holds the answer, it's solar power. Current estimates are that around 200-300,000 square kilometers of solar cells could produce all the power consumed by the entire world, at average power production rates. This means that a country like Morocco (446,000 sq km), which gets a lot more sun than average, could produce all of the world's energy consumption and still have space left over to spare. And solar cells get cheaper and easier to produce every year, as well as more efficient. Scientists have just recently unveiled a new line of full-spectrum photovoltaic cells. Already solar power is becoming an integral part of home design in places like southern California, where homes equipped with banks of solar cells may produce enough power to sell power back to the power company, watching their meter spiral backwards.
Drawbacks:
Even with all the advances in solid-state physics and engineering, solar cells are still expensive and energy intensive to produce. I don't have the figures, but it takes a lot of power to create a solid bank of solar cells. They are also terrain limited, being a lot more effective in Arizona than in Liverpool. Even very sunny climes, due to the angle of the sun and the positioning of the solar cells, may not get twelve full hours of sunlight a day, but the equivalent of eight or less.
Right now, in southern California, it costs something like $4-5 per Watt to install solar cells. That means that it would take $9000 to install 2kW of power production. At most you might get six hours of sunlight during the day in summer, so at peak you create 12kWh a day of electricity. Check that against your daily power use and see how well you do. Currently SDG&E charges about 8 cents a kWh, or about a dollar a day. So it will take 9000 days, or about the entire lifetime of the solar cells (currently 25 years) to pay back what you paid. It's only beneficial to those who use above the baseline amount of electricity, and correspondingly have to pay more.
If solar cells ever become cheap, a one time investment in a huge national energy farm in the middle of New Mexico might end the US energy crisis once and for all. Even now it would be doable, even though it would take a multi-trillion dollar investment-but over a few years, this is possible (especially with the bulk rate the government would get). And it's clean. Now if only we could mass-produce the damn things cheaply.
Anyway, that's all the musing on electricity sources and renewable energy that I have for today. Who knows what educational material I might hit you with next time.
Mostly it's because I feel like being a pompous ass educational type and preaching to people.
So, what kind of power sources are we talking about around here? Not vehicle fuels, but sources of electricity? After all, if we could have limitless electricity we could do away with the demand for heating fuel, for oil-fired power, and possibly the need for a number of other fossil fuels that we use. But what renewable sources are there? Here are some of the big names you might have heard:
Wind
Benefits:
Wind is cheap. Actually, it's free. All you need is reasonably nice terrain and a weather system that blows more the the Eye of Argon. Then all you have to do is construct a field of giant windmills and keep an eye on them and they generate power all by themselves. Plus, you can never run out of it; the amount of windmills that you would need to seriously deplete a wind front would be staggering. It's cheap, it's easy, what else can you say?
Drawbacks:
Wind is terrain limited. Extremely terrain limited. It needs a constant source of wind, and we're not talking about the "blow the roof off the Superdome" Katrina type winds either. No, you need something nice and gentle that blows all year round. Too much wind and you're going to have pieces of a giant propeller going knifing through the air at sixty miles an hour. Too little and you might as well be selling air conditioners in Eskimo country. There are very few places in the world where you have open terrain capable of sustaining a wind farm, and most of them have cities already nearby.
There are also other problems. Recently one of the country's most spectacular windfarms, the one outside San Jose California, got taken under fire from Environmentalists for the damage the unshielded propellers do to endangered birds. The farm requires maintenance too, and the maintenance crew has to haul ass all over several square miles of turning windmills just to give everything a check up. Wind is great and all, but it's certainly not for everyone.
Hydroelectric
Benefits:
Hydroelectric was the original clean energy source. People have been using waterwheels in industrial applications since we invented industry. Recently they've been able to capture the gravitational potential energy of water sources and turn it into electricity. You can use small power plants on smaller, swift-flowing mountain streams to generate local power, and massive hydroelectric power plants to generate huge amounts of power, and store water for thirsty cities. What's not to like?
Drawbacks:
Hydroelectric power is also terrain limited. In order to use a waterwheel/impeller type setup you need swift moving water. We're talking world sprinting championship, sweep you off your feet and throw you off a hundred meter cliff type water here. That type of flow is usually only found in mountainous terrain, which means that producing power in the middle of Iowa is a big no-no. Plus, if you want a dam, you need fairly mountainous terrain for this to work at all, and for you to actually be able to generate energy via flowing water.
Plus, it's either not very efficient, or very beneficial. It's not efficient at the moment to litter the rivers with small power plants. Much better is the idea of building huge dams. But, as people have noticed throughout the years, blocking off large valleys to build giant lakes tends to reduce hundreds of square miles of prime recreation area into a different sort of recreation area. This makes the environmentalists, the hikers, and those people who had the misfortune to be living in the area that is now underwater, rather unhappy.
Plus, it's dangerous as hell if the dam breaks. China's Three Gorges Dam is an excellent example of this. If it ever breaks, the tidal wave will make the Christmas Tsunami look like a ripple in a kid's pond, and it will be traveling, not over the ocean, but straight through some of China's most developed territory. Huge hydroelectric projects are big, they take forever to build, they destroy a lot of territory, and God help you if they ever break.
Nuclear Fusion
Benefits:
This is the energy of the future. It's fairly clean, it never experiences a meltdown, and the fuel for operation is one of the most plentiful in the galaxy. Although not truly a renewable resource, there's enough fuel in Jupiter to run us a good long time. In a way, it is the centerpiece of the hydrogen economy you heard about, capable of producing vast amounts of electricity at the highest possible efficiency (sans a direct antimatter converter). Miniaturized fusion technology will supply power to deep-space craft, underground colonies, and every other place we can dream of going to.
Drawbacks:
This dog don't hunt. Nobody has been able to generate what is essentially a small star within the confines of a man-made reactor without losing more energy than they gain. It's a technical issue by now, but it's a technical issue that is proving remarkably resilient to conventional solutions-or so say the plasma physicists. And nobody understands them anyway.
Plus, we haven't even tested the real deal yet. Fusion, like it occurs in the sun, involves the collision of four protons (Hydrogen nuclei) into one molecule of Helium. We're decades away from even trying that. Modern fusion research is working on colliding Hydrogen's two heavier isotopes, deuterium and tritium, together to make Helium. Deuterium-tritium fusion creates more radioactive byproduct, is more expensive, and is resource limited. Tritium in particular is extremely rare, there's not actually that much of it around. Hydrogen-hydrogen fusion is the stuff of dreams, and we aren't even close to that, or the legendary Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen cycle.
Solar Power
Benefits:
If anything holds the answer, it's solar power. Current estimates are that around 200-300,000 square kilometers of solar cells could produce all the power consumed by the entire world, at average power production rates. This means that a country like Morocco (446,000 sq km), which gets a lot more sun than average, could produce all of the world's energy consumption and still have space left over to spare. And solar cells get cheaper and easier to produce every year, as well as more efficient. Scientists have just recently unveiled a new line of full-spectrum photovoltaic cells. Already solar power is becoming an integral part of home design in places like southern California, where homes equipped with banks of solar cells may produce enough power to sell power back to the power company, watching their meter spiral backwards.
Drawbacks:
Even with all the advances in solid-state physics and engineering, solar cells are still expensive and energy intensive to produce. I don't have the figures, but it takes a lot of power to create a solid bank of solar cells. They are also terrain limited, being a lot more effective in Arizona than in Liverpool. Even very sunny climes, due to the angle of the sun and the positioning of the solar cells, may not get twelve full hours of sunlight a day, but the equivalent of eight or less.
Right now, in southern California, it costs something like $4-5 per Watt to install solar cells. That means that it would take $9000 to install 2kW of power production. At most you might get six hours of sunlight during the day in summer, so at peak you create 12kWh a day of electricity. Check that against your daily power use and see how well you do. Currently SDG&E charges about 8 cents a kWh, or about a dollar a day. So it will take 9000 days, or about the entire lifetime of the solar cells (currently 25 years) to pay back what you paid. It's only beneficial to those who use above the baseline amount of electricity, and correspondingly have to pay more.
If solar cells ever become cheap, a one time investment in a huge national energy farm in the middle of New Mexico might end the US energy crisis once and for all. Even now it would be doable, even though it would take a multi-trillion dollar investment-but over a few years, this is possible (especially with the bulk rate the government would get). And it's clean. Now if only we could mass-produce the damn things cheaply.
Anyway, that's all the musing on electricity sources and renewable energy that I have for today. Who knows what educational material I might hit you with next time.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 01:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-02 03:36 am (UTC)Am I totally wrong about this? If I am, it's my college biology professor's fault.
But anyway, it didn't sound like it was too expensive, unless it's because you'd need a lot of space and materials to do it. But everything is renewable--the metal and oil stay put, and the water recondenses. What's not to like? Moreover, the electricity can be shipped elsewhere through power lines, so you really could put everything in the middle of the Kalahari Desert and sit back and watch it go.
Hmmm. I'm going to have to go read up some more about this.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-03 12:42 am (UTC)Although it would be possible to make a set of solar cells like this, it would also be extremely inefficient. You lose a lot by turning water into steam. You lose even more when the steam goes to the turbines, and even more than that when the turbines lose energy.
Modern solar cells are Photovoltaic. They use thin film layers of p- and n-doped semiconductors to generate electricity directly from sunlight. They're much more efficient than even the giant-mirror type facilities that used to be used in deserts, efficient enough to use in small quantities, such as the amount used to power a house. Like all semi-conductor materials, they are expensive to produce in large quantities.