From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of spudboy...@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 1:20 PM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
If you need to push this TW challenge back at me, I would advise using the
techno emergence of Graphene for all this electrical because it has made the
jump and is being researched world wide. Caveat. This does not guarantee
that it will do the job at the TW level, and maybe silicon can? But my fear
is that neither can, and rather then perish from AGW, we perish from energy
starvation because the old tech is so dirty.
If we continue to rely on fossil energy sources that raises the chances for
an accidental nuclear war arising out of a conventional energy war to secure
the control of diminishing reserves.
Graphene is a very exciting material - for many applications. It has some
very interesting properties. But it is still very much a lab phenomenon and
I am not even certain that it can be produced in the scale that would be
required. There are other exotic photovoltaic materials that show promise as
well, including zinc oxide and carbon nano tubes as well as CIGS thin film
(and other thin film types). Silicon is very common in the earth's crust -
as silicates -- though it needs to be reduced and then purified. This
process of carbothermic reduction - to produce metallurgy grade silicon is
energy intensive, but the supply silicon feedstock to produce metallurgy
grade silicon is for practical purposes inexhaustible. Current refining
processes - that further refine the reduced metallurgy grade silicon -- use
some fairly dirty chemistry (such as the hydrogen chloride refining
process), but silicon is also amenable to being re-cycled and there are
other refining processes in the works. So far I have not seen any
fundamental road blocks to scaling up the production of solar quality
silicon and hence to the scale of output of newly manufactured solar cells.
Other solar PV technologies cannot scale - such as the thin film technology
used by First Solar. Silicon instead - as far as I can tell - as the
potential to scale up to the multi-TW level.
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sat, Nov 16, 2013 1:47 pm
Subject: RE: Our Demon-Haunted World
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com?> ] On Behalf Of spudboy...@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2013 4:25 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
Ok, but I am not hostile at all to geothermal, especially if these quakes
are very minor ones. This is also true, for me, with fracking nat gas. I am
real ok with this. I would sign on the dotted line regarding solar, if I can
be assured that Solar can and will power all of civilization's needs at the
Terawatt level? I know that years ago, Freeman Dyson guessed that the Sun
produced 33 Trillion times, in one second, what human energy use produces in
one year. I am not against anything that will save us. I am against empty
promises whether they be nuclear, or solar. The clean must work, or its
virtually, useless. If people insist on new, clean, energy, then they must
produce the solutions. Hence, I say, faster, please.
Look at the moving average for the growth of solar PV over the last three
decades; it has more or less kept to a breakneck speed of growth and over
the last decade has increased by a factor of 20 times. The global solar PV
deployed capacity is nearing 50GW right now. Of course there is not a one to
one relationship of capacity to the actual ability to output onto the grid -
so applying a 20% factor to this capacity figure gives a more apples to
apples comparison to say a nuclear power plants capacity figure. Even doing
this kind of correction that means that the currently deployed solar PV
capacity is the equivalent of ten one GW thermal electric power plants.
If the solar PV sector continues to grow at the pace it has historically
been growing at for the last thirty years then in another decade the
deployed capacity will start to close in on the TW scale - or an equivalent
continuous output of 200 one GW power plants (this is factoring all the
variability of solar and counting its capacity at just one fifth of its
rated value). In twenty years - if it holds to the historic growth factor
the global deployed capacity of solar PV will be 20TW. At some point this
growth has to peak - but every time in the past when it has been said that
it would bottleneck on this or that - critical supply or process -- and that
the growth rate would slow - this has failed to materialize and the growth
rate has proceeded apace.
How big can solar PV scale? Some mention peak silicon, but lower grade
supplies are plentiful, and other non-silicon so called thin film PV
technologies also exist (some of which can scale, others - like the those
that rely on telluride -- not so much)
Does anyone see any fundamental reasons why the silicon PV sector cannot
scale out to the TW scale?
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Fri, Nov 15, 2013 9:21 pm
Subject: RE: Our Demon-Haunted World
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com
[mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com?> ] On Behalf Of spudboy...@aol.com
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2013 5:20 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
>>Please understand, that unless your geothermal is really good, people will
successfully complain about earthquakes caused by geothermal energy, bath in
Basel, and Bavaria, if I remember right? Plus, the replacement tech that are
proposed, must provide terawatts of energy, to replace the dirty. Hot rock
geothermal, really deep geothermal, might solve all this, and instead of
water as a working fluid to provide super-heated steam to run turbines, a
working fluid like propane or methane has been proposed, or even air. The
carbon fuels are captured over and over again for re-use. How costly, this
is, how environmental, how technically doable-I don't know.
Funny how the very same type of earthquake, that is triggered by hydraulic
fracking - which is what you are referring to in Basel (and similar events
also shut down a dry rock geothermal pilot in northern California) -- is
now becoming widely used in order to squeeze gas and kerogen from the shale
rock. It still causes the 4 to 5 on the Reichter scale tremors, but this has
not shut down that sector or even slowed things down. There is a kind of
earthquake double standard going on.
Dry rock geothermal - which is what you are referring to - is the creation
of (or enhancement of existing fields) geothermal reservoirs in hot bedrock
- miles down below - through the process of hydraulic fracking ( injecting
water slurry mixed with poppants (sand or manufactured ceramic beads) - the
gas/shale oil secotr adds a whole slew of chemicals to this slurry such as
solvents and surficants in order to try to chemically separate the kerogen
and get it flowing.
In theory dry rock geothermal could supply base load power in very large
quantities in numerous locales on earth - the underlying geologies are quite
common. However - except it seems when caused by the oil & gas sector -
people react very poorly to man-made earthquakes, and this poses a real
problem. I would suggest they pilot this technology in remotely populated
areas first to see if they can find ways to release the underlying stresses
in a more gradual manner for example by changing how the hydraulic fracking
process is done.
The potential for this is huge, but the technological problems are also
huge. As the shale oil and gas drillers are finding out a fracked reservoir
will begin to seal back up and the flows will gum up as salts and other
deposits infill the micro-cracks, and I imagine as the sheer weight of the
overburden re-compresses these fissures - slowly crushing the poppants
holding them open.
For dry rock geothermal as well a fracked reservoir will get used up over
time - eventually it will replenish as new heat flows in to the reservoir;
after some years new reservoirs will need to be fracked.
Chris
-----Original Message-----
From: meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net>
To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Nov 14, 2013 7:29 pm
Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World
On 11/14/2013 3:39 PM, LizR wrote:
On 15 November 2013 11:39, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com> wrote:
Telmo and other 'experts':
why does nobody even mention the geothermic energy app - available in huge
Q-s and so far tapped only in (literalily) 'superficial' usage. The high
pressure ultra-clean steam from a deepened modification of the exhausted oil
wells may provide much much more energy than today's needs, so it could
serve as driving force for more than we think by ongoing technology. (E.g.
potable water, agri-irrigation, when fresh-water becomes scarce - like now -
pollution-free transportation, keeping politicians in asylum, etc.) .
I assume you mean geothermal energy. It is used in New Zealand but doesn't
provide as much energy as wind and hydro as far as I know.
It's an option in some parts of the world, certainly, but I would say solar
is more readily available overall.
It might blend well with solar. There have been proposals to store solar
energy by heating underground reservoirs.
Brent
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