On 7/12/2014 4:37 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*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.
When everyone has plug-in electric cars they will sign up to allow their batteries be used
as buffer storage.
Brent
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