In reply to Harry Veeder's message of Sun, 26 Apr 2009 23:45:08 -0400: Hi, [snip] >If you want a reliable and continous supply of power, solar and wind >will not give you that unless you can figure out how to store the >generated power cost effectively. [snip] As already discussed frequently on this list, solar can be captured and stored using algae. This is essentially what we are already using when we burn coal. We would just be shortening the cycle time from millions of years to months.
While wind and solar don't actually supply continuous electric power, they are also not as bad as you might think. To start with wind may be variable, but if connected to a continent wide grid, then the wind is always blowing somewhere, which helps to reduce the size of the "bumps and hollows". Solar would supply direct power only during the day, but then that is also when most power is needed. At night, energy stored in the form of biomass could supplement that supplied by wind, to ensure a continuous supply. Furthermore, as I have also pointed out in the past, it should prove both feasible and cheap to store energy as heat underground in molten salt. At the temperature at which common table salt melts, the Carnot efficiency could be as high as 62%. This could provide a means of storing solar energy through the night at a cost up to 1000 times less than that of lead-acid batteries. If the solar energy is collected in a desert where there is very little cloud cover from day to day, then storage for much more than a day would be unnecessary, particularly if multiple solar plants contributed, that were geographically widely distributed. Then there are also other clean power sources that can contribute during the night - hydro, tidal, geothermal. In short, by utilizing an effective mix of different clean sources, a reliable power supply can be achieved, without fossil fuels, if we really wanted to. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
