Posted on 02/07/2016 8:37:18 AM PST by Lorianne
The United States could lower carbon emissions from electricity generation by as much as 78 percent without having to develop any new technologies or use costly batteries, a new study suggests. There’s a catch, though. The country would have to build a new national transmission network so that states could share energy.
“Our idea was if we had a national ‘interstate highway for electrons’ we could move the power around as it was needed, and we could put the wind and solar plants in the very best places,†says study co-author Alexander MacDonald.
Several years ago, MacDonald was curious about claims that there was no technology available that could mitigate carbon dioxide emissions without doubling or tripling the cost of electricity. When he investigated the issue, he discovered that the studies behind the claims did not incorporate the country’s variable weather very well.
One of the big issues with wind and solar power is that their availability is dependent upon the weather. Solar is only available on sunny days, not during storms or at night. Wind turbines don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow enough—or when it blows too much. Because of this, some studies have argued that these technologies are only viable if large-capacity batteries are available to store energy from these sources to use when they aren’t working. That would raise the cost of electricity well beyond today’s prices.
(snip)
The key to this future would be the development of a system for transferring electricity across the country, so that a windy day in North Dakota could power a cloudy, calm day in New York. This would not only require new agreements between states—Texas, for instance, has its own separate power grid—but also an upgrade to the transmission lines that move electrons from one place to another.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
close, molten salt. solar thermal power is stored in large tanks of molten salts who’s melting temperature is tailored to be slightly lower than the temp of the power tower. By sizing the array field to be 3x the btus needed to run the steam turbines you can store enough heat to run the turbines in darkness 24/7 since salt is cheap and has a high latent heat of fusion and since thermal loss is directly related to surface area and volume bigger tanks are better given that volume goes up at the cube rate while surface area does not. large power towers in sunny area’s can approach the raw cost per btu of heat of natural gas and some of the largest are comparable to coal.Most also have supplemental heaters to back up the array fields should the sun go behind a large frontal system and be cloudy for days. another cheap storage medium being used is gravel heating rocks up during the day and running the brayton cycle turbines off the hot rocks at night.
Lockheed has fusion prototype that they are planning to commercialize. they claim to be close to break even with the plasma power levels. private industry will eventually crack the fusion nut not govt programs. Lockheed wants to power ships and spacecraft with fusion this century.
IF they were serious, they’d be pushin Nukes...
Just imagine those who go crazy over transmitting milliwatts of power from a cell phone tower when told about pumping gigawatts into the air.
http://electrical-engineering-portal.com/total-losses-in-power-distribution-and-transmission-lines-1
Short discussion of the various losses in energy distribution. Of course, the I^2 x R losses scale linearly with distance (twice the distance = twice the resistance R = twice the loss).
Your statement about Texas brown outs in summer is not true.
Are you from NYC?
Texas has also had NEGATIVE wholesale electricity prices on autumn nights when demand was at a minimum. It costs money to shut down a generator — even a wind turbine — but they need a load.
Wind is an absurd source of electric energy for most places on the planet. Solar technology is nowhere near to being an economic source of electric energy for most places. (There are exceptions, e.g., African villages where households only have adequate power to light a few LEDs per household and charge cell phones. Solar could offer an interim improvement until the infrastructure for real electric power could be built.)
How else are you going to store it? Huge capacitors?
The study in Nature that they reference is paywalled but some references to that paper talk about offshore wind. That’s what they want to stick us with here in Virginia and that would be a complete disaster.
Exactly.
How about, no.
National socialism.
It’s so easy. A massive federal land grab to install billions of solar panels and wind turbines.
The ONLY viable way to save solar and wind power is to build dams. But what are the chances of a couple thousand more dams being built anywhere in the country?
We can’t build nuke plants, can’t build dams, can’t build coal plants, can’t build gas fired plants, can’t build geothermal plants. BUt Siemens and Vestas can get a few trillion dollars in subsidized mandates to build those monstrosities dotting the land scape.
It is even easier. Energy would cost so much more that much less of it would need to be provided. As the middle class disappears more and more people’s energy needs can be simply ignored to make it even less costly. Favelas and barrios are wonderful institutions for saving energy resources.
States with small populations would not be able to resist being totally depopulated and paved over with solar cells or being completely covered with howling wind generators.
Wind and solar are not economical with subsidies. How do subsidies render them economical? The necessity of subsidies is prima facie evidence that they are not economical.
Problem is despite 3000 miles across the country it is still dark for several hours across the whole country.
Solar panels can’t work all the time no matter how high the voltage or heavy the conductors.
Clean Lines Energy Partners has 4 windlines planed and Tres Amigas has two. There is another from Wyoming to the west coast.
Boone Pickens had it right in 2006 when he said the govt needs to get out of the way and let the private sector build these transmission lines.
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