RE: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 16:38:27 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2014 3:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

 

I don't see people rushing into uranium and thorium power, nor, do I see
fusion coming along in two decades. For spaceflight, yes, for commercial
power, we just don't seem to be lucky with the physics of the universe.
Perhaps new discoveries about stellar formation might finally boost things
along, in 100 years. People are way too afraid of fission, and lets face it,
its costs a bitch. Wind and sun are the only thing going forward, that seems
with the grasp of the species, if only because theres lots of it out there
to be harvested, and the price is right. What's killing it are 2 things. One
is storage tech, for nights, wintertime, summer storms, smog. We need cheap
reliable storage tech, plus we need quick transmission lines to pipe it
where needed. The Germans developed some kind of closed cycle wind, sun, and
methane (nat gas) for the inclement days. Sounds doable, and likely,
affordable.

 

Grid scale storage is one dimension - and this is needed not only for
smoothing out intermittency, but also to demand shift away from peak load
periods. The truth is that the grid is stressed to the breaking point by
peak summer time load conditions and is ill equipped (as currently built) to
handle surges etc. so that relatively small events can have massive
consequences - such as region wide blackouts.

Forward sited - in key distribution nodes at large urban centers of demand
-- grid scale flow batteries (using low cost environmentally benign reagents
stored in external tanks - they can scale out in capacity by adding more
tanks. )  would be my choice. In this manner off peak supply could be
forward stored at large distribution nodes to supply a portion of the local
area networks electricity demand without needing to deliver this extra
increment of power through high tension lines already sagging from
over-heating.

Another nice way of time shifting demand is systems that use off peak supply
to freeze water balls in tanks of water, doing so in the middle of the
night. During the hot afternoon peak load period (and peak need for
air-conditioning the stored "cold" is harvested to help meet demand, without
incurring any extra load.

In addition to storage better micro-scale and both near real time and
forward projecting weather forecasting will help manage the balance of
supply and demand. 

Supply-demand balancing will naturally become paired with
high-voltage-high-capacity-high-speed-digitally-controlled switches  to
shuttle packets of power around to where it is needed - in the moment!
Acting more like a true, packet switching network.

Better electricity arbitrage markets will also help by monetizing the
problem moment by moment, and over the time increments of the secondary
power markets out with  future supply contracts. It is far easier and hence
lower cost to manage this when there is more predictability (provided by
much better and micro-scale weather forecasting, and secondary power markets
that buy and sell future supply contracts). For example, knowing ahead of
time that high wind conditions will prevail over some period of time allows
grid and power operators to plan for large thermo-electric plant maintenance
down-time.

The grid we have is a Victorian era machine; the grid we need will have to
more efficiently shuttle power and spread out load, incorporate paired
storage at both producing areas (wind farms) and consuming centers. 

Our future energy problems have a fair bit to do with this antiquated and
also highly vulnerable grid - if you want to talk about really scary
scenarios - current grid that is kept patched and strung together in often
increasingly precarious ways. North America has three large grids operating
as well as numerous smaller ones; by grid I refer generically to all built
out large scale electricity distribution infrastructures anywhere.

Our current gird is highly vulnerable to catastrophic and also long duration
failure if attacked, by an organized force that knew what it was doing and
where the key vulnerable large stationary pieces of equipment were. This is
actually something that very much concerns me, because if the grid goes down
for what could be many months and even perhaps several years (this equipment
is no longer manufactured in America and is in tight supply globally due to
newly industrializing nations demand, it is also very hard to move and put
in place), then sewage treatment goes down, water distribution goes down,
most communications goes down.

Our nation could harden these vulnerable critical sub-stations - at a very
small cost compared to say another war - and by doing so not only secure
ourselves against malevolent attempts to disrupt our grid and bring it down,
but also to withstand natural ones coming to us from large solar events.
These same security investments could with little more expenditure also add
the digital intelligence at each node in the network to enable it to become
a self-healing - and also more efficient - network. a real win-win. 

This kind of grid would also pair very nicely with a wind-solar with spin-up
natural gas reserve + grid-scale storge future energy landscape.

Chris

 

 

Only 13.2% of the total amount of electricity that the USA uses comes from
renewable sources, of that only .8% comes from solar; so 0.1% of the total
electrical needs of the USA comes from solar, and it wouldn't be even that
high if it wasn't for ridiculous and unsustainable government subsidies. And
electricity isn't the only part of the energy pie.  

  John K Clark

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: John Clark <[email protected]>
To: everything-list <[email protected]>
Sent: Sat, Jul 12, 2014 1:57 pm
Subject: Re: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

On Sat, Jul 12, 2014 at 1:33 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:

 

 > naturally, you are entitled to your opinions

Thanks, and you are entitled to my opinions too. 

 

> however they do not seem to be supported by statistics,

Take a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States 

Only 13.2% of the total amount of electricity that the USA uses comes from
renewable sources, of that only .8% comes from solar; so 0.1% of the total
electrical needs of the USA comes from solar, and it wouldn't be even that
high if it wasn't for ridiculous and unsustainable government subsidies. And
electricity isn't the only part of the energy pie.  

  John K Clark





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