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

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 20:54:07 -0700 

 

 

From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of meekerdb
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2014 8:27 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: How will air travel work in a green solar economy?

 

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.

 

I really like that idea as well. when one does the numbers, in their
aggregate, if say 20% of all cars were pure electric (+ a mix of say an
additional 10% of plug-in hybrids) that is a lot of very well distributed (&
very survivable) battery storage capacity. It would be fun to help write the
software to run such a wide distributed power exchange. or the client
software providing management and configuration ability to owners to manage
how their cars interact with the market when plugged in -- naturally closely
integrated into the car computer. a process running on it, aware of current
battery capacity, market conditions, expected near term future power needs.
A kind of arbitrage smart agent running on plugged in cars and mediating
their interaction (they are the edge nodes) with the larger wide area power
(&information) network.

There are also some large scale closed loop pumped storage solutions I like,
especially a recent large one in Southern California - the Eagle Crest
project (which is now in final stages of approval) - is designed to align
with the CSP, wind and PV electricity production going on there. It consists
of - as usual - of a high and a low reservoir that are linked by a
reversible turbine/pump. The high reservoir is an abandoned open pit iron
mine and the water is, I recall, somewhat brackish ground water (not
suitable for agriculture). The system -  when built - would pair very well
with all the intermittent energy sources in the close by regions - there is
quite a bit of wind energy getting harvested down there too. It would have a
1.3 GW capacity. I seem to remember that something around 10% of Japan's
electric capacity is in the form of that nations installed, pumped hydro
capacity - smoothing out the daily cycles of peaks and the troughs.

Chris



Brent

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