In addition, spray-on solar already exists and is likely to move into the wild soon; I’m not sure if any concrete or steel is used to make that.
Spray on solar exists in the same way a working fusion reactor exists…that is to say, it’s all experimental. AFAIK, no one is building a production system for spray on solar, it’s not commercially available anywhere, and what they do have is even less efficient today than regular PV solar panels. That might change in the future…the SoS folks talk about nano-crystals and future technologies that might make it viable down the road…but it is not a reality today.
Since that’s the case, it’s really hard to judge just what it might need once it gets to the point that you could actually start using it on a large scale.
-XT
I’m picturing taking a nice walk in the woods and coming upon a clearing with a slick black sheen over it, arcing electricity in every direction.
I’ve always loved how a certain brand of excited environmentalists pass by all those old, passe’ technologies in favor of new, nonexistent ones which probably won’t work, and even if they could are not here now, declaring that all those old people just don’t care enough, or the solution would be here.
We have solutions. They are universally ones greens don’t like for emotional reasons. The result is that they manage to stop practical, functional solutions in favor of their theoretical solutions which never actualy come about, mostly because they demand very silly things and can’t predict the future. Of course, this actually makes everyone worse off in the long run.
I’ve always loved how the fossil fuel industry and their Luddite sycophants love to poo-poo on any new technology in favor of extolling the virtues of old, uberpolluting industries that depend on resources that are rapidly running out.
Nonexistent technology? Which probably won’t work? Hell everything I’ve brought up is about technology that exists and has been shown to work to some degree or another. What technology are you talking about?
You know, the fossil fuel industry has a reason to defend itself: the latest innovations industry will enable millions of households to produce their own power to a great degree, enough that the future promises a shrinking market for utility companies. Every new house out there that puts solar on their roof or in their back yard means less money for electric companies. Every Prius or Tesla Roadster modded with solar panels sitting out in the hot sun (and this technology already does exist) means less profits for the utility and oil companies. This is what they’re afraid of.
On the other hand, what do you get out of buying into their campaign of denial?
Fair enough. I’d like to see better information about the cost for the salt though. Wikipedia says 5% of total cost, which is $20 mil, but it also says roughly $50 per kw-h of storage and 1,010 mW-h of storage. That math comes out to $50 mil or 1/7 of the plant cost. Then it looks like we are talking about 93% efficiency in storing heat. So there is more money. Wikipedia says 27 eurocent for a kwh at Andasol, or more than ten times nuclear.
It still doesn’t address all the issues. If we have a rainy week, what exactly happens? If you say, bring power in from other places. Fine, but that’s more redundancy we have to build into the system. And not a little either. Large parts of a continent can experience the same storm. So, say, Africa’s power system might theoretically have to be able to produce Western Europe’s consumption in spare capacity. How much more is that going to add to your cost?
You said in an early post that you locate solar plants in the desert, but that isn’t possible. For example, Andasol needs 5L of water to produce 1 kwh. Using that ratio, and if by some miracle I haven’t screwed up my units, you would need a volume of water equivalent to more than 10 Lake Superiors to meet the U.S’s yearly energy consumption.
Why exactly are we jumping through all these hoops when we have a cheap, safe, and reliable technology in Nuclear Energy?
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Nonexistent technology? Which probably won’t work? Hell everything I’ve brought up is about technology that exists and has been shown to work to some degree or another.
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The key words there being ‘to some degree or another’. That could be said of a lot of things, of course. Fusion works ‘to some degree or another’…but we aren’t exactly ready to start building the things tomorrow, are we? Paint on solar ‘works’…but we aren’t ready to start manufacturing that tomorrow, either.
I love the way you paint anyone opposed to you in such interesting terms. It’s a shame you don’t actually seem to know what a ‘Luddite’ is. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you comprehend what a ‘sycophant’ is, however.
What strikes me about this part of your post is that, basically, you are saying ‘anyone who brings up that reality stuff is against everything I stand for!’. You mention pie in the sky technologies, and when it’s pointed out that they are just that, pie in the sky, you throw a temper tantrum such as this. I have to think that even those purportedly on your ‘side’ in this debate have got to be either rolling their eyes or grabbing their heads and pulling out their hair, wish that you would stop ‘helping’ them out.
It’s more like amusement than fear, old boy. Paint on solar, today, is a pipe dream. It MIGHT do something in a decade or two…or it might never do anything. It’s hard to say at this point. As for costing companies money…out of curiosity, where do you think people will or do get their solar panels from? Do you suppose they pick them off the solar panel tree in their back yards? Assuming there ever is a manufactured paint on solar system, do you expect that people will be able to build it out of some chemicals they get at the local Ace Hardware store? Or that it will just rain out of the skies, coating their roofs and integrating into their household power systems by osmosis??
The amusement of seeing you flail about, and, er, contribute with every post to your, um, vast reputation and towering image…that would be my guess, anyway…
-XT
Andasol uses cooling water at the cold end of its heat engines because it can - the water is available at the site. Desert solar without water will have to use air cooling, which is possible but lowers efficiency. That said, Sandia National Laboratories have been trialing the SES-Tessara Suncatcher stirling dish technology for a good few years now and getting efficiencies up to around 30% (impressive) without using cooling water. A small quantity of water is required to periodically wash the mirrors. The Suncatcher is a mass-producable, modular unit that has been used commercially for about a year. See https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/new-suncatcher-power-system-unveiled-at-national-solar-thermal-test-facility-july-7-2009/ and http://www.alt-energy.info/solar-power/suncatcher-concentrating-solar-power-plant-goes-live-in-peoria-arizona/
Not everyone is convinced it’s cheap, safe or reliable. I’m less than happy about the safety myself, after Fukushima. Basically a nuclear power reactor is a very concentrated heat source that you can’t turn off fully for months (years if you count the spent fuel storage in pools) and which WILL rupture its containment and release radiotoxins if it isn’t kept cool. Safety philosophy of reactor design revolves around redundant containment, redundant cooling systems and redundant backup power which statistically has served us pretty well so far even taking Fukushima into account. I’m not sure those safety statistics will hold with a couple of thousand Chinese-built AP1000 copies distributed over the world, operated by inexperienced crews in countries without decent regulatory bodies, but I think one way or another, we’re going to find out. I wish we had pebble-bed reactors ready to go rather than 3rd-gen designs because they really are relatively much safer but there’s a way to go with their development.
It would be fantastic if dish-concentrator-heat-engine systems or thin-film polymer photovoltaics made solar energy price competitive and resources competitive with coal and nuclear. The real problem over the next few decades isn’t where 600 million-odd westerners get their power from but where 2.5 billion Chinese and Indians get theirs, and if they can do it with mirrors in the desert they probably should. They have to build their distribution infrastructure anyway as they go, so it’s not as if that’s an additional expense for them.
Just another data point: the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium claim to be pretty close to being able to “print” a power-station’s worth of 10% efficient polymer-film photovoltaic cells on 10 tonnes of plastic. If that happens and they can do it cheaply, that’s a world-changer.
How much more is air cooling going to cost, especially when we are already talking 10x nuclear.
As for the other thing, efficiency doesn’t really matter. Cost per KW is what matters, so what is this new technology projected to cost.
People may not be convinced about Nuclear’s benefits, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The reality is that it’s safe. And if we are giving solar the benefit of concentrating in the desert, we should give that benefit to nuclear. A bunch of nuclear plants in Nebraska or whereever is going to be virtually fool proof.
I don’t know how Fukishima makes you fear nuclear more. Fukishima was an old design, took a hit from a huge earthquake, and then got nailed by a tsunami, and no real disaster took place. I think maybe a handful of people will die young, but in the grand scheme of things that’s nothing. Compared to paying 10x for power, it’s definitely nothing.
The air cooling doesn’t really cost anything. Fins and a fan on the cold end of the heat engine rather than flowing water. The dish-stirlings have them built in.
Cost for solar is currently too high. A price of 10x nuclear is not viable and I don’t want to pay that sort of premium. Andasol is a one-of-a-kind test plant though, not a commercial proposition, and its costs are not really representative.
The cost for newer technologies deployed on a large scale haven’t been established yet. That’s basically what this thread is about! I haven’t been able to find any figures to give you and I’m keen to see them myself.
I’d like to put nuclear in the desert, but nuclear (or indeed fossil) does require a lot of cooling water. Of course, since we’re talking about filling the deserts with infrastructure anyway, I have no problem with building a cooling seawater pipeline and a high voltage DC line for a couple of hundred miles and putting a whole mess of nuke plants at the end of it. Emergency cooling might be difficult if the pipeline fails though.
If you read the threads about the Fukushima incident you’d know I’m fairly pro-nuke. What shook me was not the scale of the disaster, but the fact that a whole bunch of faults and pitfalls in the GE Mark 1 design had sat unaddressed for decades. They’d been fixed in the US Mark 1s but not in the Japanese reactors. The human factor is a bitch.
Just to expand a bit, this pdf shows the various modifications to the Mark 1 containment carried out on the US reactor fleet over the years: http://www.nei.org/filefolder/major_mod_usbwr_4511_1.pdf Note item no. 2, the torus vent to the outside world. At Fukushima, when drywell pressure went too high and the drywell was vented to the reactor building, the hydrogen in the vented gas exploded and blew the top of that building to shit. At that point they should have figured that the other two reactors should be vented to the outside world… but instead they still vented to the inside and blew another building to shit as well. Which makes me suspicious that perhaps they couldn’t vent to the outside world. Then they cut holes in the roofs of buildings 5 and 6 to prevent hydrogen build-up, which adds to that impression. What do want to bet that mod number 2 (1992) wasn’t carried out on the Japanese reactors? THAT’S what dents my confidence. Not in the technology, but in people’s capability to handle it.
Does that have to be drinkable water that we use for this or can we use regular ocean water piped in from elsewhere and then recycled?
Seawater, river water or lake water is fine. You don’t even have to use any of it up - you can return it to where it came from, somewhat warmer. That’s why power stations are located by the sea or a river as a matter of preference.
Of course, for an Andasol-type plant out in the desert, it costs money to run cooling water pipelines both ways and it costs energy to pump it.
Which we would probably pay for up-front in the form of passing operating costs to the consumer.
Call me overly ambitious or naive :D, but what would stop us from building a purification plant by the solar plant to make that incoming water potable? Bah, I know that takes a ton of resources. Such is the nature of being a habitual solution-hunter.