Agreed. When cheap oil is gone we’ll still have civilization but life will be much harder and a lot less comfortable. And I don’t see how the planet will be able to sustain its current population. How the “downsizing” will occur is not pleasant to think about.
As to what others have said about the impracticality of a hydrogen economy, I also agree. Hydrogen has good energy density and burns cleanly but the necessity of keeping it cold and pressurized seems like a deal-breaker. Better would be produce a STP liquid hydrocarbon fuel and concentrate on developing technology to burn it without polluting.
Well, it’S no my plan, because I don’t own for a solar panel company/ power plant. It’s the plan of both the Club of Rome, who showed what a little part of the Sahara would need to be covered with solar panels to supply the energy needs of all of Europe (hint: it’s a small part, not the whole desert, so the delicate fauna and flora would not be harmed); as well as a dozen solar power companies which just today signed up for the Desertec project that aims to supply 15% of Europe’s energy in the next decade, by building solar power plants in 10 mediterrean countries - both European ones like Spain and Italy, as well as African ones. By distributing them over several countries, the risk of being held hostage due to political problems in one country - as happens in winters with natural gas from Russia - is reduced.
The Club of Rome also suggest to couple the photovoltaic panels with pipes full water on the back, to double efficency. Photovoltaic panels operate best at mid-level temps. (around 25 C), but the desert can get hotter. Seawater from the nearby med. on the back would cool the panels, get hot in return, until boiling, be led back into the sea to condense, and presto: distilled drinking water for the natives. This also gives them an incentive to care about the plants, besides the jobs that would also be necessary.
The latest solar power plant opened recently was in Spain, but many companies have built and operated solar power plants in the last 20 years in many areas of Europe (including Bavaria, which gets up to 8 hours of statistic average sun light). So these companies have experience with those corrosive conditions.
How long do you think the average life-time of these solar panels are calculated at, compared to other power plants? The concrete and electronics of the nuclear power plants built in the 70s is decidly out of date today (and things weren’t projected to run as long). In the last 20 years, efficiency of solar panels has improved greatly. So even if solar panels last less than 30 years in the “corrosive” conditions of a desert, so what? They’ll be replaced with newer technology after 20 years, and have amortized by that time.
Also, if deserts are such a terrible place to build stuff, why did you put Las Vegas in the middle of one? (This is idiotic because of the water necessary for all the people, and additonally the way drinking water is wasted on outdoor pools and unsuited plants). Or what about building nuclear plants right on the San Andreas fault?
Putting solar panels where there’s a chance of being scratched, and covering them with a thick glass plate, doesn’t sound ridicoulous to me, compared to the above.
What are you doing with the salt? It sounds to me like it’s probably going to end up just caking up on the insides of the pipes, and you’re going to need some sort of ongoing procedure to keep it from doing so.
Well, I’m not the engineer in charge, but it’s a traditional way to earn money in mediterranean countries by producing salt in makign the water evaporate with the aid of the sun. Until some 30 years ago, Porta Roche in Yoguslavia had huge salt basins for that purpose (they have converted them to a yacht harbour today, because that brings in more money).
So instead of some ongoing process, it would probably be easier to construct the pipes for easy access - some kind of panels with hinges, I don’t know - and clean the salt out once a month or whenever it’s thick enough.
The placement and subsequent success of Las Vegas as a tourist destination had nothing to do with its viability as a habitable but rather its history as being a relatively lawless zone ripe for exploitation by organized crime and a weightstop for servicemen going West.
And how do you clean caked on salt out of thousands of miles of pipe? By hand? Tuareg tribesmen recruited as plumbers, running around the desert with wire brushes? (Never mind the corrosive effects of concentrated salt water at elevated temperature on even the most corrosion resistant steel and copper alloys.) And then once you’ve removed the salt from the pipes, you have to store it somewhere, or haul it away.
As for bringing the coolant to boiling temperatures by the method you describe, it is thermodynamically impossible. Sans some kind of heat pump cycle you aren’t going to be able to transfer heat from sun-heated panels at some maximum terrestrial temperature (say about 55 degrees C) to a medium that is at or near boiling, except by reducing the pressure within the pipe, which would have other impacts.
By the way, the TALE on commercial photovoltaic systems is between seven and twelve years, which means that after this time (statistically speaking) the functional yield of the panel has decreased below a threshold of usefulness. So you’re talking about a giant array of panels that have to be maintained and regularly replaced, in the middle of an aeolien desert, to support diatomic hydrogen production by electrolysis, which then has to be kept chilled or stored in some matrix and transported to the end user. This sounds like a maintenance nightmare to me on the same order as the ill-advised Great Man-Made River in Libya.
It is very easy to hand-wave away the engineering details of implementation, but it is in fact these unattended or unanticipated details that end up causing projects to go massively over schedule, exceed budget by an order of magnitude, or collapse in technical infeasibliity.
To backtrack a bit here, does free H or H2 really escape the gravitational bonds of earth altogether to escape into space? Although it’s the element with the least mass, even hydrogen has some mass (and weight), so it’s affected by the earth’s gravity as is every other substance.
Re. using seawater as a solar-panel coolant, it seems to me a more reliable way to go would be to use another fluid (such as an oil) for the coolant, and to use the excess heat to generate steam energy in an adjacent plant with large seawater tanks or pools… where it would be feasible to remove the caked salts periodically.
Oh, I know well that Las Vegas was built there because of the laws about gambling.
However, why is the reasoning: “Building a city in the desert without water simply because the way the law is written” totally okay and makes sense, but
“Building solar power plants in the desert where the sun shines to make energy” totally idiotic?
If one is a good reason to keep a city running (and wasting water), then surely the other is a much better one?
I wasn’t talking about giant arrays, but small plants spread around. The total area is small, but the plants themselves are spread out. The primary reason for this is that it’s easier to get the capital to build one normal-sized plant, used the gains from that one (once it’s running ) to both pay back the investors and build a second one nearby, use the gains from that one to build a third one a bit away, etc… instead of collecting the capital for one super-sized array.
I didn’t handwave anything. I said that I’m not an engineer. The Club of Rome has expert scientists on their panels; the companies that signed up for Desertec (and those that have build solar power plants in Spain and dry, corrosive areas in the past years) have engineers on their staff.
But I guess all those people are just too dumb to know as much about the real problems of building solar plants as you and the rest of the anti-solar lobby.
If you mean that any big project has schedule problems and cost overruns - then you are against any big project, of any kind? Or is this another one of the double standards against solar power, that is applied selectivly? By the same token, no nuclear power plants should be built at all, because there will be cost overruns.
Not that it will help anything, because facts don’t convince ideology, but hereis a picture of the Sahara and the Desertec project. Note that the power plants will be distributed; note also that for sake of comparison, the biggest square represents the total energy amount of the whole Earth (from 2005). Even if the US is the biggest user of energy, and even if consumption has gone up since 2005, we can take that square and put it over the US Nevada desert in a map of same resolution, and still have lots of space left over.
Again, I’m not an engineer, I caught the last segment of the Club of Rome suggestion on TV several months back, and they explained it abbreviated to lay people the basic principle.
However, there is a solar (and wind)-powered desalination platform in front of the greek island of Iraklia, which is enviromentally friendly, got an award by the European union, and is very much beloved by the islanders. Before, the traditional desalination plants on the mainland use a lot of fuel, and then ship the drinking water in huge ships to the island. If the weather is bad, that water sits around for up to 5 days before the ships can go, in the heat of Greece summer, meaning it smells rather nasty once it reaches the island, and is severley rationed.
With the new solar-powered platform, the islanders have clean, wonderful fresh tasting drinking water all the time; there’s enough to even water the gardens; the “exhausts” attracts fishes, which are in turn caught by the locals - win-win for everybody.
If you want to read it about, here’s an english PDF. (Page 15 ff)
(The research bit is both because the University of Aegean developed this, and to monitor possible enviromental side effects, which, however, didn’t turn up).
It’s not one of mine. I don’t own a power plant company, or othewise I’d have exact figures to quote.
Obviously, it depends on size. The biggest one currently running in Europe is Andasolin Spain. Andasol 1, already running, produces 50 MW max., the whole plant is projected to 150 MW. This equals 176 GigaWhr. per year. Constant output produced is 20 MW. Effiency is 25%. (according to the wiki; like I said, I’m no expert.)
In 2006 power consumption in the United States was 4,000,000,000 megawatt hours. cite
There are 8760 hours in a year so that comes out to 456621 megawatts.
Divide that by 150MW to get the number of small plants you will need to power the united states. You will need about 3000 of these small plants using extremely optimistic numbers. Each one of these plants needs regular maintenenance and crews to monitor them.
Only if you want to go 100% solar, instead of supplementing solar with existing and new wind energy, existing hydro power, new biomass plants etc. But of course, nobody is saying to go solar 100%.
Did you look at the picture I linked to above?
Besides, how many power plants are currently in use in the US? How many workers? How many workers would be free if you stop mining for coal and Uran for the coal and nuclear plants? How many workers in the processing plants for Uranium?
And are you really interested in switching to solar, or do you simply want to apply the usual double standard? Is there anything that would convince you, some kind of milestone, that, once is reached, you say “Yes! Now all problems are solved, and we can switch to solar”, or are you simply opposed no matter what?
I mean, in those discussions, the effiency of solar plants is a big issue, but nobody mentions the effiency of existing nuclear and coal plants. Double standard again, of course.
Yes, that’s me. I sit around in a secret underground conference room with my cronies smoking cigars and plotting evil against the heroes of renewable power to keep the world population in the clutches of petroleum companies.
Don’t play yourself down. Your secret organization is actually fighting for keeping the fingerprint of Man’s engineering off of the stretches of wilderness that still remain on Earth. You’re an environmentalist!
We can expect that, before the end of the century, we will have mastered controlled nuclear fusion. A nuclear fusion plant in the ocean can extract hydrogen from sea water for use as fuel inland. The heavy hydrogen atoms can be used to fuel the plant.
There are ways to greatly extend our life here - Cecil addressed one in a recent column on moving Mars and Venus.
On a more practical level, however, it may be possible to expand huge reflective or translucent screens which orbit between the sun and earth, shielding us from increased brightness. IIRC shielding like that could give us another 1B or so years.
Based on what? I’m genuinly curious, because since the cold fusion (cheat) debacle, I haven’t heard of any progress in that direction. I assume you aren’t thinking of hot nuclear fusion, which happens in the sun, because that would require a lot of heat and pressure.
So if we still don’t have any clue in which direction we need to go to make cold fusion work, I’m dubious. I’m not saying it’s impossible - a lot of things were invented at the end of the 20th century that people couldn’t have imagined at the beginning; although in almost all cases, at least the physics principle was known: just because semi-conductors weren’t foreseeable, the principle could be understood by scientists of that time. And of course it would be wonderful to have a small cold fusion reactor in every household to supply all energy free . I just don’t think it’s very likely.
