Posted on 03/29/2017 7:04:32 AM PDT by rktman
Every day some green energy promoter or a battery salesman tells us how green energy with battery backup will supply Australia’s future electricity needs.
A battery stores energy. Energy can be stored using lead-acid, nickel/cadmium, lithium, molten salt, pumped hydro, hydrogen, flywheels, compressed air, or some other smart gizmo. But not one battery produces new energy -- they simply store and discharge energy produced by other means. They all deliver less energy than they consume. Moreover, to manufacture, charge, use, and dispose of batteries consumes energy and resources.
The idea of producing reliable grid power from intermittent green energy backed up by batteries looks possible in green doodle-diagrams, but would be absurdly inefficient and expensive.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Is someone trying to sell free energy?
Thanks. It is always refreshing to read an article about science/technology written by someone who actually has done some research on the topic.
You are in really bad shape if the only thing you know batteries and other energy storage devices is what you learned from Viv at American Thinker
Nothing wrong with continuing to improve battery technologies with practical utility energy storage in mind. The batteries don’t have to cover everything in order to cover a lot.
However, greenies have their own idols and sometimes they don’t even honor nature all that well. Eagle-chopping wind turbines come readily to mind here. A holistic approach is needed... and I’d certainly say let’s stop chopping eagles in the name of Gaia.
Says a guy whose only qualification is as director of some obscure Australian cola export company. Too many factual and technical errors to bother trying to correct. AT will publish anything.
I think this guy is just a knee-kerk opponent of green power.
Solar power is quickly dropping below the cost of other sources of power. It will never become the dominant source of power, though, because it’s not consistently available. So yes, even with battery storage, you totally have to quadruple peak production capacity to manufacture enough MWhs of electricity.
But you know what? When I say that solar power is quickly dropping below the cost of other sources of power, that’s based on the price of MWhs produced, not peak production capacity. And the cost in sunny Australia will be cheaper still.
So yes, while batteries are still very expensive — and that won’t be forever — solar power will only be one segment of a national power system that still includes nuclear, wind, gas, hydro, and yes, even coal.
But you know what else? A lot less energy is needed at night, and wind, nuclear and hydro still produced at night, so his calculations that you need 4-to-1 generation capacity for solar is nonsense. In fact, you can probably go 100% green with merely saving solar energy from noon to 3PM. With today’s technology and today’s current investment in nuclear power.
My estimate is that in just ten years’ time, our electricity will be 15% solar, 15% wind, 20% nuclear, 10% hydro. That’s a majority of it (60%) green (in the sense of not producing carbon dioxide). And that’s WITHOUT the Obama administration’s “Clean Power” scam.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed but as so many prove; it can be wasted.
* The US consumes about 11.25 TWh per day in electricity, and 15% would be about 1.7 TWh per day. Assuming a solar load of 5.5 kW-h per square meter per day (average load in central Colorado) and a 50% efficiency (generous), you get about 237 square miles of solar panels. If the efficiency is less or you have less solar for the duration, the area increases.
237 square miles seems like a lot; you’re putting the entire nation’s grid in one location. But the U.S. has 3 million square miles to work with. So, that’s 1/40th of 1%. Not much at all.
You’re talking about the area consumed by a single, good-sized reservoir, like, say, Kentucky Lake.
You lose power in transmission, so it’d be better to distribute these solar farms across the country, but another way to look at it is your talking about the amount of land in corn farms in a smallish Oklahoma county.
My favorite green energy idiocy was a proposal to use windmills to compress air which would be stored deep in the earth and then released to drive turbines to generate electricity on demand. Windmills at best can capture less than 30% of the wind’s energy...in reality less than that. Compressing air generates heat....more energy loss. Deep in ground storage would inevitably lose pressure..more energy loss. Using compressed air to turn turbines and an electric generator...more energy loss. The entire system would be so inefficient as to be laughably impractical.
“A lot less energy is needed at night, and wind, nuclear and hydro still produced at night, so his calculations that you need 4-to-1 generation capacity for solar is nonsense”
Actually most home solar installations even without batteries are rated at 4 to 5 time average power consumption. For example I had a solar company give me an estimate for an installation. I use on average a little over 1kw, about 24 kwh a day. They recommended a 5kw system to offset what I now buy from the electric utility. During the day most of the power generated would be fed back to the grid. At night I would get that energy back from the grid. In other words the grid is being used as a storage device, a battery. If battery prices come down significantly it wouldn’t be difficult to replace the grid with the batteries. One could supplement a house system with a gas generator for the rare times when you get extreme weather conditions cause a shortage of generation.
Obviously this system works best in sunny locales.
I think we’re at a point where in the the southern regions of the US home solar makes economic sense, especially in California where third tier electric price is 40 cents per kwh.
What happens in the long run by capturing some of the wind’s energy? Are we producing negative ‘downstream’ effects by removing wind energy and flow?
Similarly, what happens to the earth when we interrupt the sun energy that has been heating it? Will the earth surface be cooler beneath solar farms, and how much difference might that make?
Hydro dams have been blamed for raising the temp of the water downstream, thus encouraging algae growth and harming certain fish populations.
It is still a big area. It is one thing to dam a river and create a large lake; it is another to cover the same area in solar panels.
How much does 237 square miles of solar panels cost? And how much would solar panel production have to increase over the next 10 years to meet that number, including replacing obsolete units?
Couple years ago, the utility in Houston was considering investing $2B in batteries vs. building new generation but they couldn’t do it without raising rates. It was an interesting concept to offset building a new coal plant.
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