Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy

[smiley]

I think there should be a tenth critical question

10) Does the energy source deliver energy at the time that this is needed? If not does the energy source allow storage of the energy until useage, and if so what are the energy losses that are associated with this storage.

If you take solar as an example:

Solar energy is nice, but solar panels have a output which depends on the availability of sunlight. When the sky is overcast they produce less, when it is night they produce nothing, In winter they produce less than in summer due to the angle of the sun.

There are two systems available. One which physically stores the energy in batteries. However in this case the storage losses have to be acounted for.

A second system is one where your house ditches excess energy on the net and draws from the net when there is not enough light. When too many people start using these systems, the network becomes unstable. A period of sun will cause a power surge trough the network and cause it to shut down.

[Revi]

Then there's solar hot water that stores hot water for your use. It's been 20 below, farinheit here at night, but our water was heated to almost 100 degrees today. Our little PV solar backup light system is charged up and ready to go. Any time the sun shines we get something. It's bonus energy. Otherwise we'd be using fossil fuels or electricity for the same services. Anyone who doesn't have solar working for them is missing out. The big question is why isn't everyone doing it? We could save millions of gallons of fuel if everyone had a solar water heater. We could live better lives on less energy. Here's a link to what we've done:

http://www.msad54.org/sahs/appliedarts/ ... /index.htm

[LionKuntz]

I think there should be a tenth critical question

10) Does the energy source deliver energy at the time that this is needed? If not does the energy source allow storage of the energy until useage, and if so what are the energy losses that are associated with this storage.

If you take solar as an example:

Solar energy is nice, but solar panels have a output which depends on the availability of sunlight. When the sky is overcast they produce less, when it is night they produce nothing, In winter they produce less than in summer due to the angle of the sun.

BY DEFINITION SOLAR IS DAYLIGHT ONLY!!! It so happens the human species is diurnal and spends most of it's active hours during daylight. The factory, shops, schools, and two or three daily meals are done during daylight, so that is when power consumption peaks. If you solve peak-hours consumption, then the job remaining is a lot easier solving whatever small fraction is left over.

There are two systems available.

No there isn't. There are dozens, scores. If you are going to be a nitpicker, then you should pick your own nits too.

Even TODAY with coal power, there is pumped water storage to use baseload power efficiently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-sto ... lectricity

This is just the list from that link of the USA pumped water reservoirs used and their stored energy capacity:
United States

* Blenheim-Gilboa, NY (1973), 1,200 MW
* Castaic Dam, CA (1978), 1,566 MW
* Clarence Cannon dam, MO (1983), 58 MW
* Edward C Hyatt, CA (1968), 780 MW
* Gianelli, (San Luis Dam & Pyramid Lake) CA (1968), 400 MW
* Grand Coulee Dam, WA (1981), 314 MW [10]
* Helms, CA (1984), 1,200 MW
* Iowa Hill, CA (Proposed 2010), 400 MW [11]
* John S. Eastwood, CA (1988), 200 MW
* Ludington, MI (1973), 1,872 MW
* Mount Elbert, 200 MW, 1,212 MW
* Mt. Hope, 2,000 MW
* Muddy Run Pumped Storage Facility, Drumore, PA, 1,071 MW
* Northfield Mountain, MA (1972), 1,080 MW
* Bear Swamp, MA (1972), 600 MW
* Raccoon Mountain Pumped-Storage Plant, TN (1978), 1,530 MW
* Robert Moses Hydro-Electric Dam (Niagara), NY (1961), 2,880 MW
* Rocky River, CT (1929), 31 MW
* Seneca Power Plant, PA 435 MW
* Summit Pumped Water Plant, 1500 MW
* Taum Sauk, MO, pure pump-back 450 MW (destroyed due to negligent pumping over the upper reservoir wall, see link)
* Bath County, VA, 2100 MW
* Rocky Mountain Pumped Storage Station, GA, 848 MW

You didn't mention compressed air, or hydrogen electrolysis, flywheels, super-capacitors, reversible chemical-reactions (such as un-rusting iron or un-oxidizing aluminum). Solar THERMAL is presently stored in molten salts that fire boilers through the night in California deserts and are neither batteries NOR grid-tie banking energy credits. You didn't mention that surplus daylight power can be used to make CHEAPER BATTERIES or sequester carbon-dioxide from dirty power plants.

The number of single detached homes is 75 million out of 105 million total housing units. The rooftops are average 2000 square feet on those detached homes and the daily sunshine averaged across America is 5.5 hours peak daily, year around, including counting all the cloudy stormy days. Dirt Cheap PV that makes 12 watts per square foot would power the entire country 100% off those single detached home rooftops -- EVERYTHING, including hospitals, schools, military, streetlight, malls and FACTORIES MAKING MORE PV.

It's time to end the arguments that are TALKING US TO DEATH, and move on reducing the costs of PV down to 2.5 cents a watt in ten years.

Beer cans and beer bottles are made of the same stuff that PV is made from. Stop goofing off and learn how PV is made so it can be made for the same price as beer cans and beer bottles when it's made in the same volumes as beer cans and beer bottles. It's not rocket science -- it's 60 year-old technology, grandfathers made PV and it's in the museums already.

[MonteQuest]

Let's save the personal attacks and flames for the Hall of Flames.

Read our Code of Conduct.

[Revi]

Solar energy is scalable. Nobody imagined that rock oil, or petroleum would be powering the world back in the 1800's. It will take a leap of imagination to see a solar powered world, but it is possible. It may not support as many of us, but it will make life a heck of a lot better for a lot of people who have it. I'd rather be taking hot showers and reading with pv light than sitting in the dark stinking.

[smiley]

It so happens the human species is diurnal and spends most of it's active hours during daylight.

That is so, but most of the electricity usage takes place at two distinct moments. That is in the morning and in the evening. The reason for that is that at these moments both the domestic as the commercial systems are online.

The sun however is not. In some places it is down, in other places it is skimming the horizon. In anyway, it is not delivering maximum capacity when we need it.

No there isn't. There are dozens, scores. If you are going to be a nitpicker, then you should pick your own nits too.

Last time I went to the shop they had no artificial lakes for sale, only batteries.

But seriously, we are talking about critical questions, not about show stoppers. The time difference between energy production and energy consumption is an important issue and should be addressed. It doesn't mean solar is useless, but it does mean that it takes something more than paving all the roofs over with solar panels to get things started.

That is the thing that I appeal to: people saying oh we use so much Watts on average so we need only so many solar panels to replace it (usually using peak output for their calculation). Stack em on the roof plug them in and you're done, without addressing the infrastructural change that is needed.


We have just seen what happens when these questions are not addressed. About two months ago a powerful gust of wind in North Germany hit a couple of wind farms and caused an energy spike in the network. This triggered a rolling blackout in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Italy and Portugal.

The system we have now is not equipped to handle over 10% of these variable types of energy. That of course doesn't say that can't be done. The key words when it comes to solar wind, tidal etc, are redundancy and switchability.

Because the input is variable, the system must be able to switch from one mode to another. It must be able to store excess energy and deliver in times of scarcity. And as the German example shows it has to do so very fast, without much ramping.

It also must be redundant, if you have a big storm, your wind turbines shut down, your solar delivers little energy, and tidal generators are also shut. that means that you have to have a backup system, either in the form of gas turbines, oil, coal, nuclear or an immense redundancy in your storage system.



Bottom line is that anyone who tries to sell alternative energy on a Watt per Watt basis is a) uninformed or b) trying to misinform you.

And that makes this a critical question.

[Revi]

Renewables could make the grid more robust, in my opinion. All those users are producers, not just consumers. Their own local micro-grids are much less likely to go down than the larger grid. Every house with a PV system and a battery bank will stay on. Get a Sunny Island system and you're all set if the lights go out to the larger grid. It'll wait a few seconds and you are back on. The problem is that it is decentralized, and can't be controlled.

I say power to the people! This may be the solution to the energy crisis. I read Vijay Vaiteeswaran's new book, called Power to the People and enjoyed it's look at what's going to happen. The grid will break into micro-grids which will be receiving power from many small producers, like our household, a hydro plant, a solar plant, a wind farm, etc. The users won't be using as much, but will buy what they need from the power company (or cooperative). Places in Sweden have town wind farms. What's the problem?

[smiley]

Places in Sweden have town wind farms. What's the problem?

There is no problem because I think these people have addressed my question. That is the advantage of doing these kind of things on a community level. It gives you the opportunity of redesigning the energy infrastructure together with the implementation of alternative energy.

When you put some solar panels on your roof or plant a windmill in your garden, do you bother how that will affect the rest of the network? Probably not. So far the power companies have been lenient towards private producers, but I think this leniency will change very rapidly if those private producers start threatening the network stability.

[Chemo]

I'm in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the climate here is warm in comparison to that of most of Europe and North America. Solar hot water systems are pretty common in Australia but the manufacturers will not sell into the ACT market because of fear of product liability claims. Despite the comparatively warm climate, winter temperatures here can drop to -8C or about 19F overnight. Perhaps one day a year temperatures stay about freezing. Solar collector tubes freeze, burst and then irrigate the house below on thawing. The alternative is a heat pump system with a roof-top collector using a non-freezing liquid but the cost is far higher. And the pump needs power to run.

I'm far from convinced about photo-voltaics. Yes you can run a house on them but the initial outlay suffers from price sticker shock. Colleague here built a new house a few years ago but confessed that though he wanted double glazing, it put the cost just beyond his pocket. How much more would an option of an inbuilt photo-voltaic array? I've seen people delete washbasins in bathrooms to get the cost of new construction down.

Doly made a good point early in the thread. Fact is there are a lot of people around the world who do not have the option of adjusting their energy sources or even improving their insulation or windows (renters) or the orientation of their 40 year old houses (homeowners like me), though at least I can push more fibreglass batts into the ceiling and put in decent curtains (seen the price of good curtain fabric lately?)

The site listing the nine questions seems to fall into the "what am I going to drive my car on?" bucket. The answer remains petroleum, maybe supplemented with vege oil derivatives. That is if you still have a car.

Smiley's point about grid instability remains unanswered. This will be important in the medium term if there is a large take-up of solar or wind power.

[willie92708]

It so happens the human species is diurnal and spends most of it's active hours during daylight.

That is so, but most of the electricity usage takes place at two distinct moments. That is in the morning and in the evening. The reason for that is that at these moments both the domestic as the commercial systems are online.

The sun however is not. In some places it is down, in other places it is skimming the horizon. In anyway, it is not delivering maximum capacity when we need it.

[/quote]

If you look at a "typical" USA power grid like:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
you will see there is plenty of demand during the middle of the day, and much less in the wee hours of the night. If you look at this graph now, you are seeing a winter demand curve. The big peak at 6PM is all the outside lights coming online after the sun sets. In the summer the curve looks more like a sine wave where the peak (last summer) was 55 GigaWatts, happening about 2PM to 3PM, when the sun is 2 hours past peak. This summer curve dwarfs the 33 GW winter curve so much you do not even notice when the outdoor lighting comes online. So, I do not agree with the above statement. Solar PV certainly can provide power when it's needed.

I have a 3.5 KW PV solar system on my house and it produces peak grid injected power of 2800 watts between 11AM and 2 PM in the summer totaling as much as 20 KWH per day. In the winter (now) it varies from 5 KWH on an overcast day, to 15 KWH on a sunny day. I'm now producing as much electricity as I use throughout the year, except during the summer heat waves when the A/C runs often.

Willie in Sunny SoCal

[GoIllini]

If you look at a "typical" USA power grid like:
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
you will see there is plenty of demand during the middle of the day, and much less in the wee hours of the night. If you look at this graph now, you are seeing a winter demand curve. The big peak at 6PM is all the outside lights coming online after the sun sets. In the summer the curve looks more like a sine wave where the peak (last summer) was 55 GigaWatts, happening about 2PM to 3PM, when the sun is 2 hours past peak. This summer curve dwarfs the 33 GW winter curve so much you do not even notice when the outdoor lighting comes online. So, I do not agree with the above statement. Solar PV certainly can provide power when it's needed.

I have a 3.5 KW PV solar system on my house and it produces peak grid injected power of 2800 watts between 11AM and 2 PM in the summer totaling as much as 20 KWH per day. In the winter (now) it varies from 5 KWH on an overcast day, to 15 KWH on a sunny day. I'm now producing as much electricity as I use throughout the year, except during the summer heat waves when the A/C runs often.

Willie in Sunny SoCal

I think the other issue is that we don't really have any current technologies that will be rendered unusable by #10.

Even if we got 100% of our energy from solar, California has shown that we can store the energy as molten salt through the night.

Wind can be used to generate hydrogen stored as ammonia.

In reality, though, we'll probably have a nuclear baseload in the first place. Despite Monte's claims that we'll run out of U-235 in 20 years, there are plenty of ways to find new sources of fissile materials or make them ourselves.

And finally, of course, we're already moving towards a deregulated electricity market. As a guy who's worked on the trading floor myself, I don't like it, because someone can try to corner the market and wreak havoc. Once we fix that issue, however, an electricity market could easily fix issues about the uncertainty and timing of electrical delivery. We already have some technologies for storing electrical energy (like molten salt), and we've really only put about 10-20 years worth of thought and energy into battery technology since the 1800s.

[Revi]

I agree completely, build a better battery and we can start to have a different grid. Every house a consumer and a producer. Batteries of different kinds or small distribution centers. We have put a lot of time and money into the existing grid, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it. We'd be a lot more secure if we all had some kind of solar on our houses, and used half of our current consumption. We could do this and live better than we do now. We may even have some extra for electric transportation like this:

www.sunnev.com

[GoIllini]

I agree completely, build a better battery and we can start to have a different grid. Every house a consumer and a producer. Batteries of different kinds or small distribution centers. We have put a lot of time and money into the existing grid, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it. We'd be a lot more secure if we all had some kind of solar on our houses, and used half of our current consumption. We could do this and live better than we do now. We may even have some extra for electric transportation like this:

www.sunnev.com

Revi,

The problem is that it's a whole lot cheaper to build 1000 solar panels at one site than to build one solar panel at 1000 sites. Perhaps if you're of the survivalist paradigm that seems common on these forums it might make sense, but it'd be a whole lot easier to just buy 1/100000th of the equity in a firm that's going to supply 100,000 people with all the energy they need from solar as a hedge against high energy prices.

[MonteQuest]

In reality, though, we'll probably have a nuclear baseload in the first place. Despite Monte's claims that we'll run out of U-235 in 20 years, there are plenty of ways to find new sources of fissile materials or make them ourselves.

Strawman. Never made such a claim. I said the recent runup in the price of uranium is due to a projected shortfall.

[Revi]

I agree completely, build a better battery and we can start to have a different grid. Every house a consumer and a producer. Batteries of different kinds or small distribution centers. We have put a lot of time and money into the existing grid, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it. We'd be a lot more secure if we all had some kind of solar on our houses, and used half of our current consumption. We could do this and live better than we do now. We may even have some extra for electric transportation like this:

www.sunnev.com

Revi,

The problem is that it's a whole lot cheaper to build 1000 solar panels at one site than to build one solar panel at 1000 sites. Perhaps if you're of the survivalist paradigm that seems common on these forums it might make sense, but it'd be a whole lot easier to just buy 1/100000th of the equity in a firm that's going to supply 100,000 people with all the energy they need from solar as a hedge against high energy prices.

Or you could have a town wind farm like in Sweden and Hull, Massachusetts. If everyone had solar hot water also we'd be saving huge amounts of electricity. I am of a survivalist bent, but I'm amenable to solutions at the local level as well. Whatever works.

In my opinion there won't be one huge solution. The economics will eventually get everybody thinking about what to do, and things will start to happen at the local level. The present administration won't do anything about the problem, so we'll have to wait until 2008 before something constructive starts to happen at the national level.

[DavidFolks]

After looking at the questions with a critical eye, I think that the title should be changed to: "If we can't use the alternative in exactly the same manner as oil, is it worth pursuing?".

Any energy source used to produce work that is not direct solar, wind, or water is effectively draining a battery that has been used to store energy that has been produced by one of these means.

What seems to be missing here is the original generation of the energy used burning oil. Question #4 alludes to this when it refers to only 4 original sources of energy that can be stored. Oil is biomass that has captured sunlight, been compressed under tremendous pressure for millions of years, and then extracted to be refined for use. This makes it a battery, that has been invested with huge ammounts of energy for a really long time.

The only problem associated with energy, is storage in anticipation of need. Currently we store it in lead/acid, lithium ion, lakes behind dams, alcohol in cornfields, bio-diesel in canola fields, coal and oil fields.

Considering the huge investments made in energy to produce a 40 gallon oil battery, I think that all of the other battery solutions we have come up with are more economical and sustainable. We can't make more oil. We can find more and more energy dense ways to store the energy that falls on us every day.

Personally, I don't have a couple of million years available to recharge the oil battery I use today.

[Revi]

Now is the time to secure some kind of battery. Batteries in my opinion include woodlots, solar hot water systems, PV with traditional batteries,
solar vehicles and walkable communities. Now while we have some resources is the time to get these things.

[Hawkcreek]

--

[mos6507]

Another way to store energy is pumped water storage, something many utilities use. I've been thinking about how this might be scalable down to a personal level, maybe integrated with either a cistern or gray-water system. I just don't know what kind of volume of water would need to be displaced in order to provide a typical household with night-time energy. Probably several pool's worth at least.

Anyway, the advantage to this design is it is simple enough mechanically to be viable long-term post collapse. If you invest in conventional batteries they will invariably wear out and if we're in post-crash, you won't just be able to go down to the store and buy new ones.

[Revi]

Now is the time to secure some kind of battery. Batteries in my opinion include woodlots, solar hot water systems, PV with traditional batteries,
solar vehicles and walkable communities. Now while we have some resources is the time to get these things.

One good battery is insulated fluid storage heated by concentrated solar. Various fluid mediums are available which can be heated up to 4-500 degrees. I intend to try this some day for a solar heated oven - tubes circulating the heated medium inside an insulated oven.
Old Mother Earth idea, that allows you to use the sun after dark.

We use that to heat our water, but it won't get over 160 degrees, I hope! I love the idea of running an oven off of it. We built an oven with clay this weekend at the kneading conference. It runs on wood, which is a form of solar storage, I suppose. It cost almost nothing and can cook thousands of loaves of bread. It was smaller, but similar to this one

http://www.intabas.com/mayashome.html

There are also huge solar ovens called villagers that can feed hundreds of people without any wood at all

http://www.sunoven.com/villager.asp