Storage was brought up. Strangly enough, there doesn’t appear to be any info on flywheel as a storage medium. I researched it for going off the grid as an alternative to batteries, but I can’t find any answers. Now if I want a lot of energy in a short burst, I can’t walk three feet without tripping over a flywheel that does THAT.
So what is the Dope on flywheels for consumer energy storage? Is it being done? Can it be done? Can one be built store power on the grid (I doubt it)? Would it make sense for individuals to store the power themselves?
What about the idea of using solar energy to create the hydrogen fuel for fuel cell consumption as they become more feasible? In the long run, won’t fuel cells be far more efficient storage devices than flywheels or batteries?
There are those who call for significant public investment in alternative energy on the scale of the Manhattan or Apollo projects. I tend to object to this for various reasons, but what do you think about it?
Also, with regard to passive solar design, that is all well and good for new construction but what do you do about existing homes? Plant lots of trees in your yard? Is this mainly a consideration for reducing future energy demand? Also, how would it effect construction prices? I know that there are lots of houses here in Texas that were built before central A/C which are comfortable in 100 degree heat, but they don’t build them that way anymore.
IMHO, Passive Solar design should be mandatory on new construction. With even the slightest thought given to correct siting, insulation and Window placement, most homes could cut their winter heat bills by 50% or more, and reduce Air Conditioning loads by 30%.
I’m glad you agree.
If I went to Henry Ford in 1930 and asked him to produce 251 million cars, he’d laugh at me too. This dramatically fails to prove the point that there are not 251 million cars in the US today.
As far as alternative energy goes, it does not make sense to suggest that photovoltaics must be the whole solution or none of the solution.
909 square miles is not a very important number to answer this question. More realistically: what fraction of electricity generation can PV handle? Over how long a time period?
The DoE and DARPA already fund a variety of alterative energy programs at various levels. Putting more money out there may accelerate development, but there is no guarantee of a revolutionary leap in technology just 'cause you throw money at it. A government-controlled program analogous to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program may bring together a lot of talent and stimulate innovation, but frankly I don’t know that it is that sort of development, nor that there is currently the kind of sustained impetus to keep such a program funded across several Congressional elections.
Bulldozing those awful, homogenous subdivisions would be a start.
Most new construction is designed specifically to use high volume forced air HVAC primarily for heating and cooling, and there is little that can be done to remediate that. However, one of the major problems is that many building codes restrict or prohibit construction methods that would allow high efficiency natural thermal regulation; updating these standards would be a start, since many of these methods integrate well with existing layouts. Estimates of construction costs vary; I’ve seen the claim that German Passivhaus buildings are virtually cost neutral; more commonly, 20%-50% is the rule of thumb depending on what methods are used. Part of the problem is that relatively few contractors are familiar with the methods used to build passively heated/cooled homes, so labor costs are higher even though the actual labor may not be significantly more, and any special materials may not be as readily available; both issues would presumably be resolved if such construction were more common.
Wind power with modern high efficiency turbines is highly cost effective on an individual basis, often giving a return on investment within three years or less. Modern turbines are almost maintenance free and if installed properly virtually impervious to normal operating damage (i.e. high winds). The problem with wind on a large scale, however, is finding suitable geography where wind power is effective, locations where it doesn’t interfere with sightlines and sound, avoiding environmental impacts (i.e. bird habitats, pollination patterns), and of course the vast footprint that windpower takes up. On land, wind power is most effective when the geography funnels wind through a pass or valley to give consistant power. At sea, offshore wind farms can make good use of reliable sea breeze patterns, although again you have to be cautious about affecting littoral habitats and upsetting people who paid top dollar for their beachfront real estate. It may also be possible to capture wind energy on a microscale for localized applications (think nanoscale “windmills”, although they’ll look like nothing that a microscopic Don Quixote would charge at) this is more of an off-grid, portable energy application.
In short, wind is a good, cheap, essentially non-polluting, and mostly environmentally neutral impact energy source (unlike hydroelectric or tidal power), but it’ll likely remain a supplement rather than provide a majority fraction of energy needs.
WR wind power, what would be the impact of removing all that energy from the air?
And what do we do for power on a dark and windless night? Or worse, a dark and stormy night? (Because the wind generators will have been shut down for safety).
Overall? Pretty minimal; the wind energy that we would be able to access will be spend on ground features pretty quickly anyway (especially true over the ocean), and will be renewed by sunlight which is absorbed by the atmosphere. However, on a local scale it may be significant (i.e. pollination patterns, impact on birds and insects, et cetera).
Sit around the campfire and tell sad stories of the death of kings? Seriously, wind power is supplemental; you have to store it when it is generated and use it when need arises. The inherent inefficiencies in that process are not a big deal as long as it is cost effective; from a pollution standpoint it is still better than burning fuel or mashing neutrons into fissile materials.
This amount of space just isn’t a problem. By way of comparison, say there’s 70 million houses in the US. Say the average house has a roof with 500 square feet. I don’t have a cite for either number, but they both seem about right. That’s (70M * 500)/5280^2, or 1255 square miles right there, which is more than enough space to take a pretty big dent out of national electricity use without installing a single solar panel in an undeveloped desert.
Be careful when looking at cost estimates, because quite often they rely on the Investment Tax Credit which rebates 30% of capital costs to solar developers, and the Production tax credit, which gives $21/MWh produced from a qualified renwable facility (typically wind). These credits are set to expire at the end of this year and while a proposal has passed the House to continue them, the bill is stuck in the Senate.
Wow! Good point! In fact if you take each car to be 6 by 20 ft then 909 square miles only requires that you make 211 million extremely fragile, highly sensitive to impurities complex electronics that decay in efficiency over time to accomplish the task, assuming the solar panels are at the equator with no clouds during perpetual noontime light.
It’s great to invoke the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program for technical problems, but those programs were designed to address very specific problems that would be entirely within the realm of trained specialists. Even with those programs, the technical specialists made some pretty serious mistakes. With alternative energy, you’re turning over the technologies to the general public, to profit-making entities, and to the marketplace in general. These are also very diverse technologies that will require a lot of different technical specialties to develop and implement them over a long period of time. There are certainly analogs, but if the Manhattan/Apollo approach was going to be used, there would probably need to be several such programs to address solar, biomass, batteries, hydrogen, and so on.
Had we been thinking, we probably could have redirected all of the funds used to fight the Iraq War, be way ahead right now on energy and still have enough for universal healthcare. Certainly drilling for more oil is the stupidest thing we could do. Alternative energy is definitely the future, but I don’t think solar is where it is at in the near future.
Please define your version of “near future”. I tend to think 10-20 years as near future and I like the idea of thinking that far ahead. If you mean 2-3 years, than I agree with your reasoning.
From your post #6, the US requires 456621 MW of power.
From here, world PV production was 3,800 MW last year. If we can double capacity every two years (it’s been doubling faster than that recently), enough solar cells could be produced in much less than 30 years to provide for 100% of the US electricity consumption.
I don’t think that this is likely to happen in 30 years, but it’s far from impossible.
If the US had spent the 1.2 trillion dollars that the Iraq war is going to cost on solar energy, we could have offset over 20% of our electrical needs.
We agree then. I’m not saying that solar can’t be part of the solution, but I think in the next 10-20 years it won’t be a major part of the solution. Even if you go with the mythical 100% efficient solar panels, you still have to cover about 180 square miles solid with solar panels and that still assumes no peak demand, perpetual noontime sun, no clouds and panels that don’t degrade in efficiency over time. That is based on the cite I gave previously for 22% efficient solar panels. I simply divided 909 by 5 to get 180. In reality, I think they are unlikely to get above 40% efficiency in the near future. Producing solar panels like this on a massive scale would be a tad more daunting than anything the US government has ever done and private industry is entirely useless for such things.
