The Future is Solar
Posted by Robert Rapier on July 27, 2007 - 10:00am
Or more precisely, the future should be electric.
I have done a lot of research lately into various alternative diesel technologies as I was working on my renewable diesel chapter. One thing that became very clear to me is that the world will not be able to displace more than a fraction of our petroleum usage with biofuels. I already knew that this was the case with ethanol, but now I think this will be a general limitation for all liquid biofuels. Consider this sneak preview (still in draft form) from the book:
There are approximately 4 billion arable acres in the world. There are many different feed stocks from which to make renewable diesel, but most biodiesel is made from rapeseed oil. Rapeseed is an oilseed crop that is widespread, with relatively high oil production.
Consider how much petroleum could be displaced if all 4 billion acres of arable land were planted in rapeseed, or an energy crop with an oil productivity similar to rapeseed. The average rapeseed oil yield per year is 127 gallons/acre. On 4 billion acres, this works out to be 33 million barrels per day of rapeseed oil. The energy content of rapeseed oil is about 10% less than that of petroleum diesel, so the petroleum equivalent yield from planting all of the world's arable land in one of the more popular biofuel options is just under 30 million barrels per day. This is just over a third of the world's present usage of petroleum, 85 million barrels per day. Yet this is the gross yield. Because it takes energy to grow, harvest, and process biomass into fuel, the net yield will be lower, and in some cases may even be negative (i.e., more energy put into the process than is contained in the final product).
The fundamental problem here is that photosynthesis is not very efficient. Consider the rapeseed oil yield above. Gilgamesh made a table that is basically the solar capture/conversion to oil from various crops. The gist is that only a few hundredths of a percent of the incoming solar energy gets converted into liquid fuels. Of course some did get converted into other biomass, which could be otherwise used for energy, but generally we get a very low capture of the sun's energy for use as liquid fuels. (This exercise can still be proven by assuming the theoretical limit for photosynthesis. One must just make more assumptions and it is not as easy to follow for a general audience).
Consider instead direct solar capture. Let's not even consider the record 40+% efficiency that Spectrolab announced last year. Let's not consider any of the more exotic technologies that are pushing the envelope on direct solar capture efficiency. BP's run of the mill silicon solar cells operate with an efficiency of 15%. That's about 250 times better than the solar to rapeseed oil route. Or, to put it a different way, you can produce the same amount of energy with direct solar capture in a 13 ft. by 13 ft. area that you can by photosynthesis in 1 acre of rapeseed. And odds are that you have a roof with an area that size, which could be used to capture energy without the need to use arable land.
Of course the disadvantages are 1). The costs for solar are still relatively high; 2). We have a liquid fuel infrastructure; 3). Storage is still a problem. But in the long run, I don't see that we have any chance of maintaining that infrastructure. If we are to embark on a Manhattan Project to get off of our petroleum dependence, we should direct our efforts toward an eventual electric transportation infrastructure.
Notes
After posting this essay at my blog, it got linked to from a number of places. Between those links and the original blog entry, some of the comments I read were largely in left field, and many of them didn't come close to representing my actual position or arguments. Maybe that's partially my fault for spending all of 20 minutes writing the post. Which brings up another point: It seems like the less time I spend on a post, the more comments and hits it gets. But I digress.
So, let me clarify a few things.
1. I am not against biofuels. In certain situations, biofuels may be (and probably are) an appropriate solution to the problem. In fact, I continue to work on solutions to biofuel problems, and I wouldn't waste my time doing this if I didn't think there were some applications. My argument is that we won't, as many people believe, displace large amounts of petroleum with biofuels. Presuming we can is presuming that technology that does not currently exist will inevitably be invented.
2. I am not against technology. I love technology - especially biotechnology. But I am well aware of the "technology will save us mentality." Technology doesn't always proceed as you think it should, and it doesn't always respond to monetary incentives. If it did, cancer and AIDS would no longer be with us, and 40 years after the moon landing, a manned Mars expedition wouldn't still be a distant dream.
3. This is not a new revelation for me. I have long believed that our future must be electric for at least 4 reasons. First, is the photosynthetic efficiency that I discussed. Second, internal combustion engines are notoriously inefficient relative to electric motors. Third, we have a lot of rooftops available that will not compete with arable land. And finally, electricity can be produced from a tremendous diversity of sources. Start with biomass, solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, natural gas, coal - all are easily converted into electricity. Contrast that with the uncertainty of a future based on cellulosic ethanol and algal biodiesel.
4. As one person argued, "solar collectors don't self propagate." True, but biofuels don't self-harvest and convert themselves to useful end products. Once the solar panels are in place, they keep giving for a long time.
5. The rapeseed example is merely a thought experiment. Don't spend too much time worrying about all of the implications of planting a majority of our land in rapeseed, or whether instead I should have planted palm oil or corn everywhere. It is just an example to frame the problem. But I do not believe, as some have suggested, that using land that is presently non-arable is going to provide a fraction of the yields you would get from planting all the arable land in rapeseed. So, I think it is a very conservative thought experiment.
6. Several people have suggested that I am just wrong about biofuels; that technological advances will change everything. All I can say is that hope is a wonderful thing. But you better plan for contingencies in case those visions of algal biodiesel fail to materialize.
7. Yes, I know that SI units are better in the context of a scientific paper. And I do use SI units in the chapter. But for most casual readers in the U.S., a yield of gallons per acre is going to be more meaningful than a yield of liters per hectare.
8. I am aware that biomass is stored energy. But you can't harvest all of that stored energy and use it, or you will rapidly deplete the soil. This is why you will never convert anything close to theoretical photosynthetic efficiency into liquid fuels. And theoretical photosynthetic efficiency is still far short of solar cell efficiency.
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Bravo, Robert!
In the long run I can see only 4 currently viable energy generation schemes. These are hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind. Hydro is about maxed out for all practical purposes and the remaining expansion of hydro can come nowhere near our collective needs. Nuclear, while the largest in installed base currently, has multiple issues attached that range from successfully managing waste to proliferation of weapons to safe operation of dangerous facilities and others as well.
That leaves solar and wind as the possible safest and most responsible energy gathering solutions we have and solar is, again in my personal opinion, going to be more reliable than wind.
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all. Biofuels are either a pipedream or for very limited specific applications only.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Amen.
I can see biofuels or other synthetic liquids for specialized uses like airplanes/heavy equipment but 90%+ of our transportation/heating/lighting demand can be electric.
People point to our liquid fuels delivery system. that may be difficult to replace in the 3rd world but the 1st world has a electricity grid even more widespread than the gas station network.
It's been said a few times, but to keep it aloft, so to speak.. I have to imagine we'll see a new surge towards Lighter-Than-Air transport. Someone linked a proposal for a sort of hybrid between a Blimp and a Plane. We'll see.
I truly loved the 'Huge Manatee' the other day.. forget compassionate conservatism, I'm advocating 'Absurd Aerial Altruism with Animals' (It's still essentially legal in Maine)
signed by my alterego,
Jetpig
( www.home.earthlink.net/~jetpig )
jokuhl,
alias Jetpig
my favorite flying marine mammals are the dolphins in "A hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" singing "goodbye, and thank's for all the fish". That's also my favorite apocolypse-some days I'd vote to demolish the earth too!
Marine mammals are protected , though. I wouldn't try to fly any bottlenose dolphins around Galveston.
There was an Army blimp base across West Bay in Hitchcock during WWII, used to scout for submarines attacking the tankers of oil and gasoline going to Europe. My father told me that it was rumored that German U Boat crews would row ashore for leave getting drunk at the houses of prostitution on Post Office Street. The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
Bob Ebersole
you said: The remains of the blimp hangers are still there, six giant concrete supports over a huge concrete slab.
where exactly is this? I'd like to see it. can you post a map of it or something? I may have seen and never noticed. thanks!
At the intersection of highway 6 and 2004 in hitchcock, head south on 2004. It will be a few miles down on the left.
I found them on google earth. Pretty cool.
I think the most appropriate way for us to decide to demolish the earth is through an overlooked rider on a committee energy bill.. but that's just me. (Or is that how it is already playing out?)
Ok, I'd better go play with my action figures again and regain some control of my universe!
Hey, another poster asked me if I'm going to ASPO-Houston, and while the irony of traveling from Maine is too harsh (Unless I get tix on the Graf Zeppelin Mach Zwei).. are you going to it?
RF
I'll be there, its only 50 miles from my home to the hotel. I've known Jim Baldauf at ASPO for about 35 years, and he has no problem imposing on his friends for grunt work, so I'm sure I'll be helping.
I'm think its going to be a great conference. Awareness has really grown in the media, and they have some great speakers and workshop leaders lined up. I'd love to see peak oil and energy policy become a campaign issue, and there are going to be some big guns there. The Houston Mayor, Bill White is a former secretary of energy and a top fund raiser for the Democrats and is speaking.
Ok guy's, here's the real scoop. Thelma's Bar Be Que has the most awesome brisket sandwitch in the southern U.S.. Her pork ribs are so succulent and beautiful they belong on the wall of the Contemporary Arts Museum. Its that East Texas black-style oak smoked meat, a great homemade sauce-and cheap. $5 or $6 bucks is guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level about 100 points and leave you grinning a greasy smile, and its only about 10 blocks from the hotel.
I'm one of Texas's great experts in cheap ethnic food. I know it sounds a little immodest, but ask my friends. Houston has at least 6 different ways to purchase goat, my infallible indicator of a town's ethnic food potential. Admittedly Chicago has better pizza, New York is the king of hot pastrami and stuffed cabbage rolls-but Houston has at least two all-you-can-eat Indian food places with great goat cury, numerous Mexican food restaurants selling cabrito(roast goat) and birria (steamed baby goat) tacos, guisado(stew) and burritos, and Vietnamese and Thai coconut milk goat curry.
So diet before you come, I'll be happy to guide anyone. Or, if you'd rather, seafood, boudain, and gumbo, soul food, or just steaks.
Bob Ebersole
There's another one at Tillamook, Oregon.
I grew up near Hitchcock and had seen the blimp base columns all my life. In Tillamook, there were the exact same columns, and next to them was another set with the hangar intact - it was cool to get to see what it originally looked like. It's now the Tillamook Air Museum
http://www.tillamookair.com/
This is it, people. The world goes down the electric road or the world doesn't go at all.
I'll take "the world doesn't go at all" for $800, Alex.
It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today. You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
Solar and other renwables are our only future but only for a very reduced stable population size. Regardless of how much energy we can produce there are is only so much space, water, air and soil. No matter how clever we are in providing for our energy we still have a very bumpy road ahead as we reduce our population levels.
Another thing I wonder about is when do we pass the point with technology that the majority of the population is required just to service the technology for an ever decreasing number of individuals who can afford not to be concerned about it breaking down.
This is just ridiculous - the projected population of 9 odd billion people in 2050 will be perfectly capable of living prosperously once our energy and industrial production systems have been reconfigured.
Solar and wind aren't the only large scale clean energy options - there is a lot of power to be captured from ocean (tidal and wave) and geothermal sources as well.
Big Gav,
Didn't know you were back from hibernation.
Some solidly good new posts on your web site:
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/
p.s. IMHO, the movie, Children of Men is a religious piece, it was initially released last Christmas
p.p.s. How do you have time for doing all that research and posting?
Big Gav was very kind in the early days of The Oil Drum...hell of a thinker and aggregator that guy.
Thanks guys - glad you still find time to keep track of what I'm up to.
I'm slowly re-emerging from hibernation, though I may take a week or two off this month to write a long post I promised the Alpha Male Chimp Who Can't Drive a long time ago...
As far as time taken to write my stuff goes, I usually find 2 hours a day is sufficient. Basically I don't watch much TV, so that is usually possible most evenings.
I find it takes 2 hours for me just to read through the flame wars in a single TOD post, and then I find myself to be just like other humans and reptiles, merely having wasted another day without preparing for the coming apocalypse. :-)
Well - when I'm posting regularly I rarely have time to read through comments (at TOD or elsewhere) which is why I rarely comment here myself.
I certainly waste more time on the blog than I should - I've got lots of real world things to do as well, although I've decided its best to work towards avoiding the coming collapse of civilisation :-)
I should note some of my larger or more complex posts take a lot longer than 2 hours - something like "The Shockwave Rider" or "Bright Green Buildings and Dark Green Buildings" can take months to slowly assemble. Then some minion of big brother goes and bans it (The Shockwave Rider) anyway without even telling me which bit is annoying...
The idea that Children Of Men is a religious movie is an interesting one - I hadn't noticed it was a Christmas release, but given the prime spot occupied by the baby in the movie that makes a lot of sense...
Well, probably not. I've been putting together the numbers on all the options, and tidal, wave, and geothermal are pretty limited -- see this on tides and geothermal, and the links there to previous summaries of hydro, solar, fission, etc. options.
Basically the only large scale options (more than 10 times present world energy use in total renewable resource - of which we could only ever harness a few percent globally, or hundreds of millions of years worth of non-renewables) are:
* "water" - hydro + if we could somehow capture the latent heat energy associated with water vapor in the atmosphere, total about 3000 times present use
* solar - total about 13,000 times world use, or more if we go off-planet
* fusion - about 150 billion years of present world energy use from D+D fusion
* fission - about 600 million years of present world energy use from U-235.
bah humbug. If we're all going to die, why are you wasting the last few years blogging?
I can buy enough solar panels to make my power bill prettymuch go away for roughly $30K. That's <5% of what we have invested in the house. Obviously that's a net metering system (no batteries) so we do have to solve the storage problem for night/cloudy days, but we'll find a way and it won't take 100 years for it to happen. $100/bbl+ oil will concentrate a lot of minds over the next decade or 2.
Just curious. Are you? Installing panels, that is.
maybe next year. I'd prefer a windmill and want to get a small wind gauge to collect data for a year first.
we pay 30-35 cts/kwhr here.
May I suggest a mix, PV and small wind, if the economics of the two are close. Especially true if you plan to add batteries and develop off-grid capability.
Best Hopes for Renewable Energy,
Alan
30-35 cents a kilowatt hour? Where's that, an oil platform in the north sea? Sun+Windmill have synergy. Most places, it is either sunny and clear, or cloudy and windy.
You can get the solar infrastructure up sometime in the next several hundred years...
And the driving force for Hydro is?
What was the initial energy input for coal and oil?
Well, theres nuclear and hydro at above 30% of electric infrastructure today.
One of them you will not discuss the failure modes of, and the other you love brining up as having a 'costly' failure mode.
Hi gr,
Yes, exactly.
"It's 2007, where is the solar infrastructure?"
So, then what do you suggest? Who does what? (Say, for eg., now, us.)
Yeah yeah yeah. I want my MTV too.
May I suggest you (1) look at your state program for solar energy. If you don't have a solar energy program in your state or country, jump to step (4). (2) Do a financial analysis of the payback, ROI, or other metric including incentives and tax credits and deductions. (3) Contact your local solar installer and get a bid, or dial-800-SunEdison (or whoever), and find out what price you would pay per kWh-per term and repeat step (2). (4) Write your State and National representatives requesting a meeting, in which you want to discuss what they are doing to accelerate solar energy use and cost reduction.
If this doesn't work, please let me know. I would be happy to help see that someone gets solar on your property.
It takes a vill...oh forget it.
Hi John,
Thanks, and I'm not good w. sarcasm, so I'm (possibly) missing some of this (anyway, I'm not a TV person, so...?) I was just kind of wondering if he/she had ideas for conversion on a larger scale. Anyway, point well taken, otherwise.
That always seems the last step: write your reps. Why not kiss their asses too? Will it work better or less well?
There are a number of good ideas down thread. Those will go nowhere if we think they must pass the gate of our so-called representatives - because they really represent the likes of Raytheon and General Dynamics.
The system is too ossified. It has to be broken apart to increase reslience and diversity - let 10 thousand flowers bloom because the culling will be terrible. Raytheon and General Dynamics will be of no help. How do we build a photovoltaic factory in Maine with Maine capital and Maine workers that cannot be sold out?
The corruption at the state level - at least here in Maine - is just as bad as at the federal level if not at the same dollar scale. Who gets to privatize the state pier? The Governor's brother or Maine's dear ex-Senator George Mitchell?
Point is, our (mis)reps won't help. If they could, they wouldn't be (mis)reps. It's structural.
Maine's PV program is a tax credit. We end up with rich people getting tax credits for PV systems while everyone else is stuck. It would be a mistake to think that was "broken". No, that is the way the legislature wanted it; it's all about class, who wins and who pays.
cfm in Gray, ME
cfm - Sounds pretty bad up there from what you're saying.
But your rebate up to $7,000 for a 3 kW system is not chump change, and you have a pretty good loan program: $15,000 at an interest rate as low as 1% to homeowners with incomes up to 115 percent of the area median income.
You can't sneeze at the time value of money, and maybe more than the rich people, or at least those earning less than 115% of the area average, can install solar in Maine.
BTW, please feel free to post the letters you've written to your representatives, so we can out them right here for no actions taken. Who knows, maybe they won't get re-elected.
waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,waiting, waiting, waiting,
Contributors here at TOD have already demonstrated that once a new energy source is practical that it takes about 50 years to get to about 10% of the energy capacity of a society and then another 50 years to get to the 50% mark. We don't have 100 years. This is why we cannot wait for the market to react. This is not business as usual but a serious crisis.
It's also why I mention nuclear. I don't particularly like nuclear because it does have its issues but as Dezakin noted, it has an installed base that can (at least theoretically) also be rapidly expanded. What we need to be doing is expanding the four categories I mentioned before with probably the least emphasis on hydro. Personally, and while it is not what I really want, I end up envisioning a future (if we can even get there) that has a nuclear baseline generating capacity heavily supplemented for peak by solar and wind.
I'm still a doomer because I don't see this occurring at a pace that I think is adequate. In fact it's not really happening at all yet. I hope I am wrong but I don't think I am at least so far. 2007 is already showing declines and most of the peak oil crowd were not counting on real decline to start til after 2010. Is 2007 an aberration? Let's hope so because if it is not and we are on the downslope right now and it is already above 2% decline rate then 10 years out may be true hell if we aren't preparing right this minute.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
The other elephant in the room is that many high grade metallic ores are showing signs of peak.
So even if we're smart enough to take the road electric, eventually society will still have to grapple with the question " what types of devices are worthy of manufacture?".
Somehow HDTVs and IPods don't fit that criteria IMO.
IPods or even better miniture generic computers are an exellent use of resources in utility and hapiness generated per kg raw material or kWh. And the innards can be built to last for decades wich of course only is usefull if the technology plateus or lots of people becomme poor.
Large displays such as HDTV:s are also usefull, especially if they are long lasting.
Voice and data communication is only slightly less important then water, food and shelter since they make all kinds of efforts easier and gives access to culture.
Reading you I could figure out that hey everything is important.
...
GZ - agreed about the crisis (but drop the redundent serious). Can you point me to the contributors or sources at TOD about adoption rates of energy technology? ASAHP if you can.
Dennis Meadows relates energy return to rate of transition here (slide 31).
http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Meadows_ASPO...
He also gives some scope to the current infrastructure size that will need replacement.
It's best to just drink the water.
gTrout - thanks but did you look at the viewgraphs??? Do you know WTF you're talking about?
Consider seriously either a large shot of Russian Vodka. or
plain old peristoika and cheers.
I think some of the animated slides were destroyed in the PDF conversion. But page 31 was clear text.
Here is the basic idea:
Say you have a nuke plant that will provide power for 40 years with an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) of 10. So that means it takes 4 years of nuke output to provide enough energy to build a new nuke.
If you reinvest all energy produced from each nuke, there is exponential growth. But it is limited to 10 new plants from each plant built. If you try to build faster, then society must pay in energy and your nuke plants are a power sink.
This means the exponential growth is strongly limited by EROI.
Just a quick spreadsheet example. If you assume all energy is reinvested, and the nukes are constructed instantly once enough energy surplus is availiable, then you get these results
EROI of 5 gives 11 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 10 gives 70 total nukes in 20 years.
EROI of 20 gives 2216 total nukes in 20 years.
Cleaveland gives nukes an EROI of less than 5. Meadows says 10 or less. Odum is 4. Those are the middle of the road answers.
You can see why EROI 100 oil and coal was so wonderful for growth. The last value would end up getting constrained in growth rate by slower building or materials shortages, etc. And these rates are just break even. Society gets no power from this scenario. If you bleed off energy for the rest of us, the growth rate is lowered. And you can get a big jump on growth by taxing other energy sources, hence the nuke buildout in the 60-70's when energy was cheap.
gTrout - my apologizes. The presentation material is excellent and your EROI comments are pretty interesting. Boy was I off the mark.
No problem. The EROI to growth concept needed the example to make any sense. I will polish it up this weekend with a more complete model.
The transition to wood, coal, and oil were all aided by high EROI sources. Those allowed baby sized industries to grow into monsters in just a few years. That energy surplus meant they had tons of energy (money) to reinvest in better ways of doing things.
Nukes, solar, and wind all started with negative EROI values. They had to claw up to the current positive numbers. If you start out negative, it is hard to have profits to reinvest in growth and research.
Now we just need some serious belt tightning to free up investment capital to put into those technologies.
Personally I would like to see a cartel with monopoly power on coal be formed and push the price up. And a windfall profits tax be passed on all fossil fuel profits. Those funds could only be put into renewable energy investments.
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
Meadows can't even do his arithmetic right. 1000 MW/day over 50 years is more than 18 TW, not 10 TW. If he can't even multiply simple numbers correctly, how can his EROI figures be trustworthy? And he doesn't back his assumption of 10:1 EROI with anything.
I've calculated simple EROIs for parts of nuke plants. For instance, the concrete can be "paid off" in mere hours of full-power operation. I'd trust Dezakin; Meadows is just pulling numbers out of his butt.
Per my understanding, much of the concrete in modern nuke plants has to be alumina based, which is much higher energy value than regular concrete.
Alan
Say what?
This just doesnt make much sense... Not all parts of a nuclear power plant are the same. There are parts that require type V cement (low alumina) for sulphate resistance because of cooling water interaction and then there are parts where just structural strength is important, such as the containment dome, which can be any old cement.
I can't imagine embodied energy for the different types of cement is not an order of magnitude different, or close to the energy required for steel manufacture.
His argument may be a little circular, but he does go into this two pages on. You don't get the full rated capacity if you are counting what it takes to build and run the plant. But, with a growth projection, this is already happening in the numbers on which the projection is based so it seems to me that either you reduce the size of the "energy gap" to an effective size or you say what part of the projected growth is servicing energy production.
Another way to look at it is you don't get to keep the ones from the first ten years (40 year lifetime) though you need them to get the later ones, and the ones from the last 13 years don't count because of payback so you've got 50-10-13=28 years clear giving 10 TW effective capacity. To me the last -13 is the problem because you are grubbing in the dirt now for ore and you'll be gubbing then as well, though at that rate of burn, you'll be grubbing for some very low quality ore.
Cheers,
Chris
The whole 13-year figure is based on compounding of very iffy assumptions. If he doesn't have any error bars or sensitivity analysis, I'd say his PDF isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
And none of them are remotely based in reality.
Cite their methods and we'll compare notes... again.
Most of the papers are not on line. To chase back the sources I will need to spend a day or two in the campus stacks and I have not had time.
Till then I find these sources credible. Odum and Cleveland helped define the field. They have more experience at this than almost anyone. And I like the fact they agree in value (of course, they could be siting the same sources).
I have not found a "review" paper (published in a reputable journal) similar to this one on wind EROI. Maybe Nate has seen one. If you spot one, please post it.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/17/18478/085
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
It sort of demonstrates the unreliability of Cleveland; He just started obsessing about potential subsidies of variable cost (insurance indemnification.) If he wants to play funny numbers with accounting, fine, but then he gets into what might as well be as testable as philosophy.
There isn't any way nuclear power has a lower energy return on wind on the plant alone simply because the construction costs are easily calculable in terms of steel, concrete and the like... roughly five to ten times as much for wind. If Cleveland somehow claims nuclear has an energy return below five, then wind doesnt have any energy return at all if we ignore fuel costs...
Which I suspect where his argument lies. Throw in fuel, and you can either use the Storm Smith approach or the Vattenfall analysis. Guess which one has credibility.
Wind power doesn't require enriched uranium. From the font of all knowledge, the wikipedia:
Modern gaseous diffusion plants typically require 2,400 to 2,500 kilowatt-hours (8,600 to 9,000 megajoules or 9 gigajoules) of electricity per SWU while gas centrifuge plants require just 50 to 60 kilowatt-hours (180 to 220 MJ) of electricity per SWU.
Example:
A large nuclear power station with a net electrical capacity of 1300 MW requires about 25,000 kg of LEU annually with a 235U concentration of 3.75%. This quantity is produced from about 210,000 kg of NU using about 120,000 SWU. An enrichment plant with a capacity of 1000 kSWU/yr is, therefore, able to enrich the uranium needed to fuel about eight large nuclear power stations
Neither the United States nor France actually has any gas centrifugal enrichment so I'll go with the 2,500 kWh per SWU. I think the Iranians cornerred the market on centifuges. 120,000 SWUs is 3*10^8 kWh. There is 8760 hours in the year and I'll assume the nuke is online 90% of the time or 8000 hours. So thats 1.04*10^10 kWhs.
So that limits the EROI to no better than 30 and gas centrifuges are a game changer. I guess I wound up proving nothing, oh well. That's science.
Why? Nearly 60% of the global enrichment is centrifuge, and in the US and France diffusion plants are being replaced by centrifuge enrichment.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip33.htm
Say what? I dont recall them having anywhere near the required infrastructure to compete with Russia in SWU per year.
Sorry, I'm confused. I don't see how it is possible to include fuel costs for wind? Maintenance yes, consumables (hydraulic fluid?) yes, decommissioning yes, but not fuel.
You probably misread the argument; Its just that nuclear power plants require 1/5th to 1/10th the embodied energy of wind turbines while lasting two to three times as long. If one is going to suggest that nuclear has a lower energy return than wind, you have to place your argument in the fuel cycle; Which has been demonstrated many times to be overwhelmingly positive.
How do you figure? The carbon footprint for nuclear is between 30 and 170 g/kWh which does not bode well for a high EROEI. Looks like it would come in around 10 or so. Where is the demonstration, or does 10 sound about right to you?
My own thinking is that once we transmute the daughter elements to stable isotopes, we end up with ERORI much less than one. I think that the question of what to do with the waste has not been adequately addressed.
From the very political link:
Garbage in, garbage out. I thought that was where it was going, and its not like we haven't been here before. The Storm/Smith data has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a nice steaming pile, with the most obvious gamebreaker that they absolutely depend on gasseous diffusion for their numbers, before you start disecting the multitude of less obvious lies relating to plant construction and mining techniques.
Why would we bother? Almost all spent fuel decays to stable isotopes after 300 years anyways, except the transuranics which can be burned as fuel. This doesn't impose extra energy cost.
Is there a solid reference then on ERORI for nuclear power that covers the full life cycle? It seems clear that electricity is not too cheap to meter so there must be some accepted value that accounts at least for the running of the plants. Is this the study you are criticising? I've only just looked at it and I don't see the enrichment method as being the main cost they cite. They seem to find that the system goes below EROEI=1 for low quality ores and the quality of the ore has nothing to do with the method of enrichment. I haven't read it closely yet.
I don't know if you've ever gone hiking. If you have, you might be familiar with the saying "Pack out your trash." With long lived radioisotopes, you've got to do a bit more and retrun them to a stable state. I doubt very much that reprocessing really is going to do much for us given the energy cost of cleaning up the rest of the mess.
Certainly. Its been a topic here before.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
Its the most glaringly obvious; When you insist on using gasseous diffusion enrichment because its some 50 times more energy intensive per SWU than gas centrifuge techniques, its a major red flag. The University of Melbourne in their assessment of nuclear power lifecycle costs dissected this spread 'study' in more detail if you are curious.
It would be nice if they actually measured the energy costs, as the University of Melbourne study did, rather than operate from theoretical models where they can dictate how they would prefer reality ought to behave.
From the Rossing mine study:
And this is from the lowest grade ore mined today, of 300ppm.
The best argument I've heard was of the acid insolubility of different mineral bodies impeding uranium reclaimation from different ore bodies, but given how widespread uranium is allready, I somewhat doubt this is a problem we'll even bother trying to solve in the next several centuries.
Sorry, there is no energy cost for sealing up spent fuel in concrete, which really is all thats necissary. I'm not sure what other energy costs you're alluding to. Maybe using nitric acid reprocessing plants, but its not like we dont know how to use pyrometalurgical techniques now, or even have to bother doing any reprocessing at all. All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
All the spent fuel generated in history would fill up an average sized parking lot.
Best Hopes for no earthquake close to this "parking lot"...
Why? Spent fuel casks are big, stable lumps of concrete with low centers of gravity. You could rock them all day without anything happening to them.
I've mostly looked to TOD for expertise on oil so I'm not up on discussions about nuclear power here. Perhaps it is not the best thing to rehash that now. My own sense is that the limit of using nuclear power responsibly implies EROEI less than 1 owing to the need to deal with the waste. There are no accepted solutions to this problem because 1) low energy solutions cannot be engineered for the required timescales and 2) it is not apparent where the energy would come from for high energy solutions that do provide safe disposal. Because the cost curve for solar, in particular, is so favorable, number 2 may be solving itself, and we can think of nuclear power, along with fossil fuel energy, as a stepping stone a technology in the manner discussed by Bucky Fuller.
There is no doubt that allowing waste to cool for several hudred years is going to be a part of the solution. There are some interesting developments in transmutation research in the field of low energy nuclear reactions and in cryrogenically induced shortening of the half-life, but it would be more than premature to estimate the effect of these, if any, on EROEI.
So far as I can tell, the dolar cost of nuclear power is only going up and increasing it's share of the power supply only increases it's per kWh dollar cost. A large increase also has a secondary effect of depleting economically recoverable reserves of uranium prior to the end of the plant lifetimes, ensuring even higher costs. This is just the oposite of how renewable energy behaves. Owing to industrial scale advantages not yet taken, renewables come down in cost as they become a larger fraction of the energy mix. Thus, the points made in the series of rebuttals about the future efficiency of nuclear power may, thankfully, be moot.
I was interested in the proposed solution to the discrepancy in plant construction energy, that highly skilled labor might account for the offset. If so, this suggests that training times would limit deployment of nuclear power on much larger scales in timeframes relevant to peak oil. Don't know if this is actually the reason for the disagreement and the level of ad hominum on both sides in the various rebuttals makes me think that it will be hard for them to come to agreement any time soon. But, who knows? The call for greater transparency seems like common ground, while the nuclear industry seems more and more inclined to cover things up. Perhaps no reliable estimate can be made until that issue is resolved.
I do think that the spent fuel fills cooling ponds rather than parking lots, or at least I hope so. There are heat management and safety issues involved in concentrating the waste too tightly.
You realize that this waste isn't the one ring of Sauron; After several hundred years its much more benign than most mercury compounds, which are toxic forever. We dont have plans for geologic repositories of mercury. This is mostly based on nuclear exceptionalism and ignorance.
While I don't favor 'high energy solutions' to waste management, because there is no urgency to destroy the waste (what happens if we dont destroy it? nothing) as long as you have a neutron surplus in a fast reactor you can destroy long lived radioisotopes and burn transuranic actinides. This has been demonstrated several times before, though not as economically competitive; Its clearly energetically positive however.
Please, why bother? We arent short of space or time. We are only talking about several thousand tons here, not exactly a huge amount.
Nuclear power competiveness is nearly entirely wrapped up in capital costs, construction schedules, and interest rates. Fuel simply isn't an issue over long periods. We've had a spike in fuel costs that not even touched the end price of nuclear power.
Er, on what do you base this?
Sure, it spends several years in a cooling pond, then gets sealed in a storage cask for dry storage depending on location.
Hummm, you may not be aware of the chemical toxicity of some nuclear waste. However, it needs disposal because it is radioactive. This is a characteristic of nuclear waste, not really an exception.
Being economically competitive is a little irrelevent since breeders are not legal in the US.
Your estimate of the waste mass seems a little low but you'll note, I think, that it is somewhat proportional to the power so far produced. Disposal will thus be proportional. If it takes more energy to dispose of properly than has been produced, their will be a question of where the energy comes from.
I would say that we are still exploiting "easy" resources. There is a point, where mining becomes nolonger economically viable. That point is usually estimated to be in about 85 years at the current rate of use. Magic, like seawater, is only that. Even the number 85 years assumes some introduction of breeders if there is any growth in output, and, these are not legal in the US.
Secrecy in the nuclear industry is on the rise in the US. Last year there was a public NRC licensing meeting for a Tennessee processing plant that had to shut down for about 7 months because of a 35 liter spill of highly enriched uranium solution. This nearly caused a criticality incident. The public meeting was not attended because it was kept secret. Many documents needed to assess the safety of reactors are no longer available to the public. As the incident last year suggests, secrecy is being used not for enhanced security but rather to cover up gross incompetence. Going forward, it looks as though neither the nuclear industry, nor the NRC will be reliable sources of information.
It's also a characteristic of bananas, and yet people actually try to increase their intake of dangerously radioactive potassium in bananas.
Mercury componds need disposal also, yet not much fretting in the public mind about mercury compounds despite being much more dangerous to public health. Whats important is the stability of the waste. Gooey gunk that can migrate around the environment is bad; Oxide spent fuel sealed in concrete isn't.
Bullshit makes the flowers grow, one by one, row by row.
Why do you think it takes so much energy to seal spent fuel in concrete and steel dry storage casks?
Try again.
http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
This isn't an indication that secrecy in the nuclear industry is 'on the rise.' Its an anecdote, and one that was reported eventually anyways. A criticality incident didn't occur, and there wasn't any reason to report it. We don't hear about every time a chemical company cleans up a mercury spill in house.
Not sure about that, but blame that on the 'war on terrar' paranoia more than industrial conspiracy theories.
I've looked a little closer at the web site you've been referring to. I find it's treatment of solar power to be deceptive. Why, for example, do they not state the amount of solar power expected in 2040 based on their assumed growth rate? Why do they appear to apply an efficiency twice? If this is an industry related site, it is not too suprising that they may be a bit optimistic for their power source and less glowing about another, yet, for nuclear power, which takes a great deal of planning, what is happening in 2040 is very important since this would be halfway through the lifetime of a plant proposed now.
I think you should take what they say with a grain or two of salt. Overstatement of resources is typical for industry aligned entities. That, after all, is the main issue that TOD addresses.
I'm not so sure that an uncotrolled accumulation point is something that would cause death and destruction in the case of a mercury spill. Your analogy seems a little strained. In any case, the nuclear industry has a pretty poor safety record. What is changing is that we will not be informed of problems and so not be able to react to patterns of incompetence, poor design or deferred maintenance. The NRC has sought to boost confidence in the job they are doing by being candid and forthcoming about problems with the industry. Their new tack can only harm the industry in the long run by promoting a sense of laxity that will lead to fatalities. It won't take much to end the lease on remaining design lifetime that the industry managed to salvage after TMI.
Could you please cite the link and quote, and how thats relevant to nuclear power production? I don't know what you're talking about. If solar power somehow becomes more competitive than nuclear, that's wonderful, but entirely unrelated to observed competitiveness of nuclear power today, or the resource base for the future.
It was done by several at the University of Melbourne, not exactly closely affiliated with the industry as far as I know.
Indeed, which is why their study merited several guest posts here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323
Its exactly the same, except mercury doesnt become less toxic over time, and most mercury compounds migrate much more readily than most spent fuel radioisotopes. You can stabilize it as mercury sulfide just as you can stabilize spent fuel fission fragments as glass...
Do you want to try that again?
Injury/death per gigawatt hour maybe?
Consider that dam failures have killed thousands overnight... several times.
Let's take this up again if nuclear power comes up again on TOD. You may want to study how sustained or runaway nuclear reactions work before then though. You're thoughts on the mercury analogy make very little sense.
Here is the link you requested.
The bottom line is that the past quarter century was well and truly squandered. The investments we needed for the future were not made so that the elites could rake in more money to spend on multi-McMansions & other goodies. We're all going to bitterly regret that.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference. But after construction, it is prohibitively expensive to retrofit it in most cases.
Even such simple things as good insulation for McMansions would have made a substantial difference.
And it does not happen because that insulation makes for more expensive up front construction.
But it makes the home owners less sensitive to fuel costs and thus more credit worthy. Thus the banks can lend more money.
Banks in Sweden are usually willing to finance conversions from oil heating or direct resistive electric heating to firewood, pellet or ground/sea source heat pumps. I figured that this makes sense since the saved heating oil or electricity cost enables the home owner to pay the interest and amortize and the house and thus lone security increase in value making it a low risk loan.
Perhaps loans to uprate macmansons makes sense after folding and writing of the building loan?
The substandard insulation (and leaky construction, and windows with summer sun blazing through them without shades, etc.) should have been prohibited outright as non-compliant to building codes.
A building which is almost entirely self-heated in winter, stays cool in summer, and is resistant to most water and weather damage is "future proof". Investments in such buildings are worthwhile. Buildings which can become unusable due to water/weather damage or the expense of keeping them habitable are the civil engineering equivalent of mayflies.
The primary article was Luís de Sousa's Marchetti's Curves but I believe it's also been referenced before. TOD has a lot of material these days.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Thanks GZ.
Well, I have an idea. That 50 years figure is standard industry making energy available. And it may be quite right. But solar can be different. I'd compare it more with computers. We'll only need the equivalent of Apple Mac ][, Windows 95 or anyother mainstream catchers for normal people to see that the power they can harvest by themselves could be staggering.
The thinking process here would be to leave energy companies on producing solar cells and leave energy deployment and investment to private (normal people) entrepeneurs. Think of the power of wikipedia compared to any other "pedia" made by specialists. That's what I'm talking about. It could seem to be too late now, but remember, wikipedia is 3-4 years old. And its as mainstream as it gets. These things, when well structured, grow incredibly fast.
But as the internet required the government to push it to an incredible system, so will solar and other energy systems need a wide system that will solve the "net-metering" problem annunciated here. There are some private interesting projects on that, but it should be more mainstream.
I like your thoughts LuisDias.
I wish to write an article about the large-scale transformation of the US industrial and manufacturing base in the late '30s through WWII. I already have a bunch of data on production rates of various armaments - planes -tanks - soldier's uniforms...boots.
While not all that comfortable with a comparison to a wartime setting, annual production rates exceeding 1000% of large manufactured goods (ie aircraft) suggests to me the possible.
Now I know many will say that was built out on cheap energy and I agree, but importantly it was built on out on shared sacrifice.
Fire when ready.
I expect geothermal to be a big part of Australia's renewable base load at some point in the future. It is essentially proven technology.
Tidal and wave generation both have enormous untapped potential too. That's one of the best things about renewables, is that there are so many different options, all suitable for various locations. Sure, all of them are more challenging and most likely more expensive than burning fossil fuels, but the end of cheap energy should just mean the end of wasteful energy usage.
wiz, we's love use. Watch (some of us) as we wind up.
Actually there is a fifth: Conservation. Every time we reduce our energy by being able to do the same task with less energy it is the same as building a new power source that lasts the life of the activity.
Stopping nuclear power for not being perfect is like stopping the distribution of emergency food since it contains transfats to stay fresh during distribution.
Or emergency food that contains GMO. That has happenned.
Are you speaking of the GMOed corn in Africa?
Dig deeper - The US makers wanted to send what could have been viable seeds (Thus allowing the US makers to get their patent tributes for the genes). The African nations said they'd take the corn cracked or ground up as flour - the US aid agency refused.
Viable seeds MAY be food. But they are also seeds. And the ability for them to be seeds is why there was an issue.
deleted, see next post
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/OCHA-64CGT9?OpenDocument
Referring to Zambia 2003, the government banned the import of all GMO grains. In addition, the people had eaten their seed corn and needed seeds for next year's crop.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/hunger/relief/2007/0407slowaid.htm
The corn comes from the World Food Program and the WFP is an agency of the United Nations. They rely entirely on voluntary contributions from governments, corporations, and individuals. The United States provides half of their 2 billion dollar budget.
It is WFP policy not to buy food already in a famine area but rather import additional food. It is US law that the aid money must purchase food in the US and transport it on US flagged ships.
In Zambia, the WFP wanted to change their policy and purchase corn in Luanda where the store houses were somehow full. The Bush administration tried to change the law so they can provide a portion of the aid in cash, but were stymied by the usual agriculture special interest groups. So the whole thing got mired in red tape while children starved.
Some will argue including myself that nuclear isn't simply 'not perfect', it is in fact highly problematic in comparison to the other choices we face. That is the issue!!!
Do we choose a path that creates as many or more problems than it solves or we go with choices that also have their unique problematic issues. To use your food analogy, it is not like there is no other source of emergency food, it is a matter of where we choose to get our emergency food.
I have repeatedly stated that several of the renewables can do anything that is claimed for nuclear with the same level of effort directed.
I might add that in economic analysis of any energy technology that the full cost including externalities be included.
That requires some pretty hard thinking about the unintended consequences of each technolgy, and agreement on how to 'price' what has no market.
It may not even be possible to agree whether the price is positive or negative. On the one hand, Chernobyl made a city uninhabitable; on the other hand, it effectively created a wildlife preserve. Bruce Sterling calls these "Viridian involuntary parks".
Sticking with your example (and not the waste issue or the mining issue), the cost/benefit of ‘one uninhabitable city’ for ‘one wildlife preserve’ fails to account for the loss of human life, current and generational human and wildlife sickness, suffering, and mutations, dispersal of radioactive aerosols across parts of the globe vs _______?
If a logical extension of your example is to argue we know too little to ever fully account for the costs and the benefits of some human activity, I certainly hope you bring up values, not financial but human, in your discussion.
I'm not arguing for that point of view, just noting that there are certain to be people who hold it.
There's one situation where I would agree with it. If an area was currently farmed but would become much drier with climate change, I think it would be better for it to be abandoned to become grassland rather than repeat the Dust Bowl phenomenon of the 1930's. The land would become useless for farming anyway, and the benefit of having the soil held in place by roots rather than blown away is enormous. Radioactives decay much more rapidly than soil forms, and if people were forced off the land soon enough for the grass to take over it would be a boon to humanity in the long run.
I see approximately zero likelihood of this happening, just because of the world's settlement patterns.
Solar energy panels do not use water. You can plant them in a desert. They don't even require soil, so you can plant them in a stone desert. Half the deserts on earth are stone deserts, deserts that don't even have sand that you could irrigate even if you did have water.
This article is great! But it neglect to mention biodiesel from Algea, the most realistic of all biodiesel option. Consider these facts:
1) Algae produce 100 times more oil per acre than traditional food oilseed crops (i.e. corn, soy, etc.).
2) Algae eat CO2, the major Global Warming Gas, and produce oxygen.
3) Algae require only sunshine and non-drinkable (salt or brackish) water.
4) Algae do not compete with food crops for either agricultural land or fresh water.
5) Algae can reproduce themselves and their oil every 6 hours, while it takes Mother Nature millions of years to produce crude oil in the ground.
photovoltaic systems are ready-to-go, off the shelf systems already. Ditto wind turbines = indirect solar. Costs are already coming down to the point where wind is competitive now.
How far along is algal biofuel?
no one is saying don't work on all possibilities, but you can't hang your hat on a dream (unless you are the Bush idiots crowing about hydrogen as a smokescreen for doing nothing)
I checked with GreenFuel not too long ago. Their AZ pilot algae plant covers 0.3 acre. They are getting 40% CO2 capture. Their yields are 6000 gal/acre biodiesel and 5000 gal/acre ethanol. Remember that their technology requires a concentrated CO2 source like flu gas.
Solar is gearing up with a couple of 500 MW fabrication plants coming online as well as expansions of existing plants nearly everywhere. Silicon supplies are still tight. You can get panels for $3.00/pW retail now (Aten solar) so prices come to about 6.6 cents per kWh if you are willing to use 24V appliances just when the sun shines. I'm also assuming cheapo yard mounts. Inverters for a grid connect and proper roof installation bring the cost higher, but still inline with most utility prices. Here is a first look at the feasability of converting entirely to solar in under twenty years.
In case anyone forgot:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2531
And John Benemann, one of the study authors, commenting on it:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/05/algal-biodiesel-fact-or-fiction....
There is definitely more hype than meat here. Doesn't mean that it will never work, but those 10,000 or 6,000 gallon per acre yields have never been achieved. Maybe some day, but not right now. The line between speculation of what might be achieved (presuming some challenging technical issues are solved) and what has actually been demonstrated, has become horribly blurred.
First off, I agree wholeheartedly with your post. Biofuels will never scale. That said, consider this snippet of algae airline fuel, no less. It was posted on drumbeat a while back. I noted it, but didn't receive any replies.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4132048a13.html
In my thoughts on algae, I always see 2 major problems, among others. Contamination of desired species, and energetically efficient harvest in open ponds. This group, by working directly in sewage treatment ponds, seems to have circumvented contamination issues, and harvest issues don't seem to bother them.
Any comments or information would be appreciated, especially what alga they are using-even as to whether it is filamentous or unicelluar.
Contamination of desired species,
That was a constant theme in the NREL report. Things that worked well in the lab were quickly outcompeted in the wild. So, the solution to that is closed reactors. But, as others have shown, that is simply not cost effective.
The solution to that is to use wild algae and take whatever they give you. So long as you can make money without getting mostly triglycerides for fuel, it looks reasonable.
But in the end it is more efficient to simply dry and burn the algae in a co-gen electricity power plant. Not that this is a bad thing -- a power plant located with a sewage treatment facility.
you are both wrong.
the correct measure that NREL found to solve the problem was to completely clean out all organisms from the fast running ponds and reseed with the proper amounts of the desired strain.
Thus you constantly reseed the ponds 3-4 times a day with the desired strain, and harvest 3-4 times a day. This prevents wild organisms from gaining a foothold.
NREL, from reading the report was more involved with biology than real engineering. Engineering solves scaleup, but IMHO it cannot solve this problem. Scaleup for bio reactors is a non-trivial problem. Small devations in construction yield substantially better and worse ponds.
Some engineering was looked at, but it was mostly scientists attempting to scale up the lab results with little guidance. There was too much repetition in the experiments for my liking, very little innovation in solving the major hurdles encountered. Some of the experiments were also run poorly, with data not being provided at the conclusion thereof.
Comments on the above.
The group is Aquaflow Bionomic Corp of New Zealand. They have had prior results with a biodiesel blend, and now are going for airline fuel. They have teamed with Boeing and NZ Air to test the fuel, for cold temp and altitude effects. I guess they are going for Richard Branson's prize.
"Boeing's Dave Daggett was reported this year as saying algae ponds totalling 34,000 square kilometres could produce enough fuel to reduce the net CO2 footprint for all of aviation to zero."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/secret-kiwi-fuel-ingredient-is-pon...
The group uses sewage treatment ponds and "wild algae", and claim their system would work for diaries and other high nutrient treatment lagoons. They "modify" the ponds, I assume reshape, for growth and harvesting ease.
They have been invited to join a CA tech institute, The Girvan Institute. But no word on their harvesting process. Or if they are seeding the ponds. I guess secrecy is the name of the game with prize pursuit.
True. But algae don't naturally grow in fields of dirt by throwing seeds. You need engineered facilities the whole way through like solar cells. Cost per acre is enormously higher than crops. Possibly bigger that PV or concentrating solar.
You need to pump in enhanced CO2, unlike plants---all plans with realistic success involve with success are next to coal plants and just enhance the useful energy per CO2 emitted
Algae quickly mutate to propagate and survive and be hardy and not produce oil. The problem is that the oil-filled algae are in an unusual metabolic mode---a diversity of wild type organisms in an open system will quickly outcompete the engineered organisms. (Jurassic Park syndrome.) These won't produce oil.
Consider another engineered system where we grow unicellular organisms for their chemical yield: biotech pharmaceuticals. Now, of course the purity requirements are even higher, but you need very expensive bioreactors with continuous maintenance and control of process in order to reliably produce the desired output chemical in quantity and maintain a monoculture of the desired source organism.
I was really hot on algal biofuel until I read some serious investigations.
I now understand to some degree why the DOE program was dropped.
Maybe jatropha will end up working.
mbkennel, sure there are issues with biodiesal, but I think its too early to say whether these problems can be overcome with engineering. One idea of the top of my head would be to truck CO2 algea plants, or maybe even build some kind of pipeline, so they dont' have to be right beside the coal plants.
The whole premise of the OP is that biofuels aren't feasible.
WTF? OP =
1. observation post
2. Roman Catholic Church Order of Preachers (Dominican)
3. out of print
please explain your meaning of OP!
Original Post?
Original Post.
oil production
No, it means original post or original poster, referring to the first post in a thread or the person who made the first post in the thread. OP is common usage throughout the internet on various types of forums.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Oh Please....
Cute. But that doesn't change the fact that I've seen OP refer to "original post" and "original poster" since before the days when I read Usenet news with Tin 1.0.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Looks like DOE is funding some promising research to me:
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=49412
Looks like DOE is funding some promising research to me:
Errr, didn't you state you have 'facts'? Now you cite 'promising research'?
Which is it? Facts or ideas that may or may not be true?
a) The 100 factor has good theoretical support in a scaling law for all vegatative species. It is not a reason to doubt the NREL data. The specific reproductive rate of a plant varies as the inverse one quarter power of the mass of an individual plant. A rape seed plant is very approx. 1kg. An individual algal plant is approx. 10^-12 kg. The scaling law indicates that algae should be 1000x better than rapeseed. This is reasonable grounds for believing that the NREL algae work can be improved upon. (Niklas & Enquist, Invariant Scaling ... , PNAS v.98 p2922-2927)
b) All biomass/biofuel schemes mitigate CO2 in direct proportion to their production of biomass. Any data that indicates otherwise must be suspect.
c) growth rate from NREL is closer to a day than 6 hrs., and this should be compared to other biofuels, not petroleum. Still its pretty good compared to trees, both at biomass production and CO2 mitigation.
d) There are few economies of scale in algal biomass. (Any conceivable production facility will be vastly larger than an individual plant. The tiniest mechanical device is sufficient to move algae from on process step to the next. All product transfer can be done with piping.) Thus there is no incentive for large corporations to invest in it. But small agricultural operations can, and will experiment and survive.
e) NREL work was always directed towards using flue gas CO2. There is plenty of CO2 in the wild. Algal production can be done almost anywhere below 60degrees absolute latitude. NREL studies of future potential were flawed by strange political constraints on the research. There was a lot of effort wasted on nice ideas that didn't pan out. But a few good data were published.
Biomass, in any species, is not a source of energy. For biomass, the Sun is, of course, the source (think 'solar'). Electricity is also not a source of energy. It is a technique for transporting and transforming energy. For some electricity, the source is biomass, for some fossil fuel or nuclear. Electricity is a great technology, but it is not an answer to the question of source. Photovoltaic panels might be a great source of electricity to run the pumps in an algae pond farm, certainly better than diesel engines running on biodiesel from the algae, and vastly more realistic than electricity from a nuclear plant hundreds of miles distant from the pond.
Of course if what is meant by 'electricity' is just photovoltaic electricity then that should be made clear.
Electricity from coal has no more future than electricity from oil or natural gas (Peak Coal?). I see a strong possibility of civil disorder during the transition to a post petroleum world. Nuclear power and social disorder are a really really bad combination. Talk about things to worry about, what could be better than that! So, in future, electricity is either photovoltaic or from biofuels.
Will algae save the world as we know it? Of course not. But it is rather like heating with wood. It can be used by small groups of humans and will probably be so used whether or not we (peak oilers) approve.
Makes no sense at all to me to tout the CO2 eating characteristics of algae when it is being used to produce biodiesel which will soon be burned releasing the CO2 right back into the atmosphere.
I agree that because it depends on fossil fuel use (though you might try this) there is extra CO2 entering the atmosphere. But, it would anyway. In this case, it is detained for a bit, AND oil that would otherwise be used is not. So, you are not capturing the CO2 from the coal really, but preventing CO2 from the oil entering the atmosphere since the oil remains in the ground.
Now, it does not much matter when the CO2 goes into the atmosphere, so if you are just delaying the oil use, then it is not much of a help. But, if you are doing this as part of an overall program to permanently cut emsissions, with a plan to do something else once the coal plant has to be shut off too, then it can make some sense as a transition technology.
This article is great! But it neglect to mention biodiesel from Algea, the most realistic of all biodiesel option. Consider these facts:
Facts? I see a list that you have posted. I don't see facts of open air, non CO2 concentrated ponds. Nor do I see how the de-watering issue is taken care of.
Please show actual FACTS with URLs ... what you have is a bunch of statements.
Robert, you have grabbed the brass ring once again! :-)
I think that a confluence is building around the solar idea for one simple reason: It is the only large scale source that gets us loose from an endless seasonal "depletion chase".
I have been a fan of the biofuel idea in my youth, but once you see that it involves multiple industries, and conversion after conversion...it becomes what I finally began to see as "death by one thousand conversions"...providing the land, providing the seed, getting the seed in the ground...fertilizer, pest control, energy consumed in harvesting, energy consumed in process and distilling, transport to point of use...it finally begins to look like one of the old Rube Goldberg cartoons, like a steam engine used to power an automatic coffee pouring machine or something!
The path has to be much more direct than that, much fewer steps to usable energy. And it has to be scalable, and production more easily installed at or close to point of use.
Now the debate on what type of solar capture works best for the application....the old silicon chips, the newer generation of CIGS (Copper Indium Gelinium) or a thermal system (concentrating mirror or possibly Frensel Lens of some type)
Things are just now starting to get interesting, as we refine our options down to the ones that have the most bang for the buck! Thanks for your ideas, look forward to your high level of analysis and math applied to the various solar options! :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Professor Eicke Weber , Linear Fresnel reflectors for concentrated solar thermal cheaper then Parabolic mirrors.
there are comunities where horse drawn transportation exist.
eletrical vehicals would be better. west bengal goverment in india wants to subsidise them.
I agree bio fuels don't go far to replace a cubic mile of oil. I don't see this as a reson not to expand bio fuel production.
is there a way to use biofuel in the refining of heavy crude that would create less polutants in the refining process. like the present controversy in indiana.
perhaps the intention of blending with high cetane biodiesel made using catalytic hydroprocessing.
I don't think I know what I am talking about. maybe we don't use that much diesel
Great work Robert...couldn't agree more.
Came to the same conclusion last year...now working on it.
My company has turned our efforts to Solar and Electric vehicle technologies. The whole last 10 months have been reorganizing the company and prototype development. Should have something to show everyone late fall.
The whole GW thing is helping our situation with certain organizations...most not ready to consider the energy problem.
Here's hoping we can hold it all together long enough to make a difference.
One thing I haven't seen ANY comment about on The Oil Drum is Professor George Olah's book "The Methanol Economy":
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-Gas-Methanol-Economy/dp/3527312757/ref=...
Here's one of the better reviews of the book (saves me typing, watching spinning beach balls in firefox):
By B. Pankuch (Cranford, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Olah (1994 Nobel laureate carbocation chemistry, director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute) and his coauthors do an excellent job going over fossil fuel(coal, natural gas, oil) resources, how close we are to running out of each, the vast number of uses for these resources, and the likelihood of climate change due to their burning. It is assumed that in the future we will have abundant energy available from nuclear and alternative sources. Methanol would then be one of the prime carriers of this energy, and an alternate source for all petrochemicals.
They also cover alternative renewable energy sources, compare using hydrogen versus methanol as a carrier of energy from new renewable energy sources and nuclear energy plants. The authors do a thorough job pointing out the enormous use of hydrocarbons throughout the industrial world for a huge array of products. Not only do we need vast new renewable sources of energy we also need to be able to use this energy to change new carbon sources into useful products. The new source of carbon, methanol from CO2 and H2! Olah, et al shows in great detail how methanol can be changed chemically into the precursors for just about anything and at very high efficiencies. We would use energy from nuclear and new renewable energy sources directly where we can, such as powering our factories and homes' electrical systems. We would use some of this new energy to change CO2 from emissions and hydrogen from electrolysis of water, into methanol to run our cars, trucks, etc., and provide feedstock for all the products now produced from petroleum. Note that methanol formed this way adds no new CO2 since CO2 from the surroundings is used to make it. This is very similar to using ethanol produced from corn or other biomass, except it involves more chemistry.
The new process involves using electrochemical or photochemical reduction of CO2, which forms methanol, formic acid and formaldehyde, CO2 + 2H2 -> CH3OH with additional products which are also changed to CH3OH,
HCHO + HCO2H -> CH3OH + CO2
They don't give a lot of details, because they have a patent pending on the process.
In the interim, while we are developing and building alternative renewable energy sources, we can change coal, natural gas, biomass, etc., into methanol. This is already done to a small degree and existing infrastructure for gas and oil can be used with small adjustments. The authors also compare using hydrogen and methanol, as storage and transport media.
It was a surprise to me that there is more hydrogen in a liter of liquid methanol (98.8 g of hydrogen) than in a liter of liquid hydrogen (70.8 g at -253?C), water for comparison has 111g of hydrogen. Methanol would store and transport much more easily than liquid hydrogen.
The first sources of CO2 would be exhaust gas from utilities and big factories, which generate a lot of CO2, hydrogen would come from water being electrolyzed, CO2 + 3H2 -> CH3OH + H2O. Then as our CO2 capture methods get better it would be captured directly from the air. Anyone in the world would with access to energy, would then have a source for a vast array of chemicals! Note that if CO2 becomes a useful commodity people and nations will compete to pull it out of the atmosphere, and prevent it from being released since it has value. This has much greater appeal than other proposals such as sequestering of the CO2. A lot would depend on how efficient the process is. It would be useful if they would give some information on this, but Olah replied to me that `...we have of course extensive patent coverage filed for and in process. For obvious reasons in our book we could not go into any details.
The driving force for the Methanol Economy is new energy from nuclear and alternative renewable energy sources, which we don't have yet, replacing hydrocarbons as fuel. Olah, et al has great confidence that the many problems facing these new energy sources are solvable. The authors are quite negative on the safety of hydrogen, but don't seem to see a major non solvable problem with nuclear. Nuclear as we know certainly has its problems, and most of us are wary of nuclear. Scientific American had an article (December 2005 issue) on the latest nuclear plant design which uses 99% of the fuel rather than 1% in current plants. It would also have proportionally less radioactive waste, with a much shorter halflife. One of the hookers is using two separate liquid Na (at 600?C) loops as a coolant. Not a minor engineering feat. Another recent Scientific American article Sept 2006, instead sings the praises for 3rd generation nukes with improved technology, but with the same problems we currently have.
A fuel cell is being developed which uses methanol directly.
Anode: CH3OH + H2O -> CO2 + 6H+ + 6e-
Cathode: 1.5O2 + 6H+ + 6e- -> 3H2O
Overall: CH3OH + 1.5O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
It has a theoretical efficiency of 97%, so far 34% has been achieved, while using H2 and O2 in a fuel cell has a theoretical efficiency of 83%. Of course methanol produces CO2 (which would eventually be used as feedstock) as compared to H2 which just produces water, a great advantage.
Anytime we contemplate huge installations for generating energy, whether they are nuclear or renewable we face the problem of transporting the energy to the user. Methanol, since it can use existing infrastructure of pipelines, trucks, gas stations with few changes would appear to be far cheaper than hydrogen. A July 2006 article in Scientific American `A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy' pointed out that our nation's electrical grid is experiencing problems and a possible solution would be to create a new national grid which would carry electricity from distant plants-renewable, nuclear, coal fired etc., by a superconductor cooled by liquid hydrogen. You would have the electricity almost resistance free (about 10% is currently lost in transmission) and the hydrogen for chemical uses. The economics of all these proposals is very hazy.
Some further food for thought is a 1998 study that indicates that the unsubsidized price of gasoline was between $6- 15/gal. A number of other studies place it at $3-11. If their methodology is close to correct then the current subsidy is much higher now, and if this subsidy were available to alternative energy sources they would be much more competitive.
Wow, awesome post. Going to have to read up more on methanol.
Conventional transmission losses are about 7% per 100 miles. HVDC (high voltage direct current) losses are about 0.5% per 100 miles. HVDC is probably cheaper than liquid hydrogen cooling :)
American Superconductor by the end of 2007 will be producing 720,000 meters per year of superconducting cable. AMSC says "orders for essentially of of this wire are now in hand". These superconducting grid wires have properties that automatically help in fault mitigation. (disclsure: I own AMSC stock)
The cable will have to be cooled by N2(l). No other way about it. This is the point of failure for HTSC cables, there are no room temperature superconductors yet, and it is unlikely that there will be in the near and mid future.
These wires do not help with fault mitigation, they still fail if the current carried is too great, or if external magnetic fields penetrate. These cables simply reduce electrical losses to zero, but outsource the cost of the losses to the cost of the cooling mechanism. Electricity is conserved, but cooling must be provided at cost. I will also note that the amount of energy saved cannot be greater than or equal to the energy required of cooling, else a perpetual machine of the second kind can be created.
from AMSC:
"Our 344 superconductors are “smart materials” because they are able to switch from a superconducting state with zero resistance to the flow of electricity, to the resistive state when the current passing through the wire exceeds a critical value. Because a high resistance reduces current in an electrical network, the “smart” switching feature of superconductor wire can be used to limit high fault currents that arise because of network short circuits. This is the basis of fault current limiting devices for utility and military applications."
I doubt the ability of the cable to be both HTSC as well as conducting, there are few materials which are both.
most HTCS are ceramics, with negligable conduction at room temp. (well nobium tin is pretty good, but $$$)
other thing, if the HTSC goes beyond the critical boundary, the resistance increase from zero to some number greater than zero causes the wire to throw the generated heat off. THIS IS BAD. When this happens in NMRI machines you have to quench the magnet in liquid helium?/?hydrogen because the heat builds like you would never believe.
the wires will likely vaporize/melt if the coolant is removed from the system. The wires were meant to be maintained at a specific temperature, thus the heat flux being worried about to minimize cost, is that from outside in. However the energy being transmitted through the wire is great, and has the potential to evaporate all the coolant, and from there pretty much instantaneously melt/vaporize the wire.
Ask the company how the excess heat from the switch to regular conducting material will be dealt with in a non-destructive fashion.
G, undergrad engineer
Thousand megawatt thermoelectric plants have high inertia. They do not load follow worth a damn. JET can plug in their megajoule flywheel any time they want. The ISA requires the utilities to have a spinning reserve of 1% of the power on the net. That is expensive. Superconductors are a way of storing huge amounts of power that can be dumped on the grid almost instantaneously. That improves reliability. Superconducting transmission lines are still science fiction.
Wall Street Journal
May 21, Page A2
"Consolidated Edison Inc., provider of electricity to nine million people in New York City and Westchester County, is pursuing a sweeping plan to upgrade its aging electric system, including installation of state-of-the-art superconducting electrical cable in midtown Manhattan."
"The $39.3 million installation, set to be unveiled today, will be largely funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security."
"The Con Edison project will use cable able to deflect power surges that was developed by American Superconductor Corp."
"Jay Cohen, undersecretary of science and technology for Homeland Security, said he believes superconducting cable has the potential to "revolutionize" electricity delivery, making systems better able to bounce back from blows from lightning strikes, equipment failures or hostile acts. Mr. Cohen, who formerly was chief of research for the Navy, said his agency is picking up about $25 million of Con Edison's cost."
Gligamesh,
I disagree: It doesn't have to take any energy at all to keep the SC cables cool, except for the fact that we intend to use them in a 300K environment. Cables in space could be maintained at low temp for free! There's no 2nd Law problem here, just an insulation problem.
And I agree, BTW, that there's no way that all that LN2 cooling could cost less than the 7%/100mi. or whatever of power saved. Thermal gradients are expensive!
I believe something referred to as the 'sealand process' was done as an experiment back in the late 1970's.
Water, electrical power, compressors, heat and catalysts.
Stream47: You've opened a new door here that lots of folks are not yet realizing. The cover of Olah's book screams simple chemistry ie: CO2 greenhouse gas & CH4 methane = CH3OH methanol. Think about this a moment. He's telling the world that CO2 when catalytically combined with methane equals the world's simplest biodegradable fuel alcohol.
The other way that methanol is manufactured around the planet is to combine H2O as steam (H2 & O) with CH4 methane to produce CO H2 H2 H2 snthesis gas and this mixture is then catalyzed with a nickle based catalyst to form CH3OH methanol - the world's simplest and cheapest biodegradable alcohol.
In his book title, Olah is showing us that even more methanol can be synthesized even cheaper using sequestered CO2 as additional carbon feedstock. The magic oxygen atom which converts methane natural gas into methanol liquid alcohol (stable, ambient temp and pressures) can come instead from CO2 instead of from H2O water while producing more synthesis gas intermediates for catalysis. Get it?
The oil industry has purposely kept CH3OH methanol out of the fuel tanks for the past 90 years. Methanol is a bit more corrosive than gasoline when used as a neat fuel as it "oxidizes" so well with one carbon matched to one oxygen in this basic molecule. The four little hydrogens contained within methanol are really just along for the ride as they balance the magnetic valance of this molecule and don't account for 1/4 of the Btu energy oomph of the one carbon atom in this molecule. The oxygen is what converts methane gas into methanol alcohol - and this oxygen is what fans the flames of the carbon atoms in hydrocarbon petroleum-derived fuels getting them ALL to burn up - thus provide more power plus a biodegradable exhaust emission stream at the same time.
Biggest problem with methanol is that it contains 49.9 - let's round this number up to 50,000 Btu's per gallon. Most gasoline contains about 112,000 Btu's per gallon - so like in Indy 500 race cars - to go the same mileage as gasoline - 2.24x the volume of methanol must be combusted to attain the same Btu's of mileage density - but when properly adjusted for air/fuel ratio and waaaayyyyy far advance spark ignition timing - the net result of combusting neat methanol is that the motorist or race car driver has about 35% more power at the accelerator pedal combined with a biodegradable exhaust emissions profile.
Now compare corn ethanol at 75,500 Btu's per gallon. It takes 1.48x the volume of ethanol adjusted for air/fuel ratio to equate to the same Btu strength as found in most gasoline. The ethanol is a two-carbon molecule whereas methanol is a single carbon molecule. Most gasoline is about 5 carbons to 9 carbons but very little of the gasoline is straight chain simple molecules. It contains rather complex hydrocarbon structures that when ignited, provide more Btu's of energy density than does C5 pentane (gasoline's light end) for example. Problem is, about 10% of the complex hydrocarbon components contained in gasoline, diesel or jet fuel don't fully combust when ignited. These unburned hydrocarbons emitted out the tailpipe are what phase separate in the blue sky of water vapor to become an airborne oil spill we see and breathe as smog.
When adding in an oxygenate like methanol or ethanol into gasoline, the amount of dissolved oxygen in these alcohols further increases the oxygen content of the whole fuel mix. The atmospheric combustion air is approximately 20% oxygen - so 50% oxygen content in methanol or 34% oxygen content in ethanol when used in 10% volume blends with gasoline is adding another 5% or 3.4% total oxygen to the air/fuel combustion ratio. Following me? This extra oxygen works to make the 10% unburned gasoline or diesel or kerosene-based jet fuel actually burn up. When this happens, the motorist "feels" extra power at the gas pedal, typically notes serious increases in fuel economy (mileage) and his emissions stream becomes a whole lot cleaner as a net result.
Remember, brown urban smog is just an oil spill in the sky - uncombusted oils that came out of gasoline, diesel exhaust pipes and unburned oils or coal hydrocarbon components emitted from refinery smokestacks, coal-fired power plant smokestacks and especially cement kilns.
What Olah is suggesting is to utilize sequestered sources of polluting CO2 greenhouse gas as "additional" carbonaceous feedstock which is abundantly available and cheap - and therein recycle some of the global warming problem back around as a oxygenated bridging mechanism into petroleum-derived oily float-on-water fuel pool.
What Olah hasn't yet fully realized is the catalytic methodology to build methanol molecules back on top of themselves. Two methanols equal a synthetic ethanol. Three methanols produce a normal propanol. Four of them combined make up a synthetic C4 butanol, etc. And as the carbons in these single chained biodegradable alcohols are increased in length, so is their Btu's of combustion energy density.
Consider a mole of 50,000 Btu methanol molecules becoming 45% stronger Btu by this method of new catalysis. Or the resulting blend of alcohols being 20% stronger Btu when compared to C2 ethanol.
And I'm referring to a blend of synthetic alcohols being formed by catalysis which offer 90,400 Btu's per gallon or a little higher. Use CO2 greenhouse gas for one-half of this new biofuels front-end carbon feedstock and you are onto something here which can go global extra profitably and make the biggest dent in the biofuels industry which corn or sugar cane or rapeseed oil or switchgrass (all harvested ag feedstocks) cannot touch by volume nor through inefficient fermentation depolymerization production costs.
Simply my thoughts. And thanks for the link to Olah's book. I've been aware of it for some time yet decided to purchase a copy today.
Gary Bridge
What you don't realize is that Olah begs the question of how you get the hydrogen to make use of the CO2. When you start digging into that, his entire house of cards falls down. It's the same thing with the H2CAR process, adequately dissected elsewhere.
Engineer-Poet: What you haven't realized here is that the extra hydrogen to make use of the CO2 and reform it as a component of additional CO & H2 syngas volumes comes from boiling H2O water into steam just a little bit ahead in this particular reformation process. Boiling water simply releases both a H2 and a O which are both utilized as gaseous intermediates in synthesizing a CH3OH methanol molecule (utilizing the CO2 as additional carbon-based feedstock) plus a host of other, stronger Btu fuel alcohols.
Don't confuse my thoughts or Olah's with anything to do with isolating H2 for combustion in traditional engines. Some of the answers which people are looking for are right in front of their faces - albeit they just can't see them.
Take a look-see at the cover message of Olah's book once again. He's addressing a rather specific point even though he seems to understand the potential of ambient temperature, ambient pressure, biodegradable methanol even though it contains only 45% or so of the Btu's within a gallon of gasoline. Yet methanol is commercially synthesized using stranded methane reserves at the equator or from coal in South Africa for less than 20¢ a gallon. OK?
Remember too that the first vehicles output from Detroit assembly lines in the 80's carrying FFV chips under their hoods were designed to utilize M-85, not E-85. These M-85 FFV model cars were quietly diminished by political forces. The difference between a synthetic CH3OH methanol and a corn-derived C2H5OH ethanol is ONLY one carbon atom in the base chain of these molecules. But the chemistry sets and the methods and the process economics to isolate these two different lower alcohols is as different as night and day.
Be aware that 5¢ bushel of cattle manure contains more carbon building blocks for biodegradable fuel synthesis than does a $4+ bushel of corn kernels harvested with diesel tractors.
Just my 2¢ worth here. I'm glad that an earlier poster opened up the link to Olah's book and some side issues here in this long discussion thread...
G.B.
Blah! Blah! Blah!
If you knew any chemistry you would know that all those "fuel molecules" can be synthesized from almost anything containing their bare components (C, H, O).
IT'S NOT THE END PRODUCT WHICH MATTERS.
IT'S THE ENERGY BALANCE OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS.
How many joules are recoverable by burning the fuel with respect to each joule consumed in the production.
Unless the "primary ingredients" (oil, sugar, cellulose) are already energy rich the efficiency (EROEI) is usually below 1, and can be so even when the primary source is energy rich if the production process is inefficient (as for ethanol in some cases).
Or more precisely, all fuel synthesis and refining have EROEI below 1. The point with them is not to gather energy but to turn raw material / energy sources into usefull fuel.
Or more precisely, all fuel synthesis and refining have EROEI below 1.
True, but don't confuse the issue by restricting the energy balance boundaries to strictly the refining process.
It is true that by refining oil into gasoline you get less energy from the refined gasoline than went into the refining process + THE RAW ENERGY FROM OIL (if you had burned directly the oil), but given that the raw energy from oil comes at ONLY the energy cost of prospecting and drilling the whole process, prospecting, drilling, refining is still at EROEI of about 10 to 20 (yet steadily declining).
Given your other posts I would not have expected such a light minded critiscism from you.
You could create methanol for fuel cells by gasifying biomass.
Corn stalks, wheat and rice straw, switch grass and lots of different feed stocks from forest and agriculture can be gasified to producer gas, then processed to synthesis gas and then methane and then methanol.
There are an estimated 1 billion tons of usable biomass in the U.S. indicated in a Department of Energy study. With 100 gallons of methanol per ton that would make 100 of the 140 billion gallons of liquid fuel that we use for transportation. Combine that with fuel cell efficiency and you have a CO2 neutral form of transportation.
CalGuy,
Are you sure you're not talking about destructive distillation? Nothing but heat and a closed container are required to make methanol from biomass - hence the name, "wood alcohol." Sounds like a natural app for a solar concentrator. It's not particularly efficient, but we have to return most of the carbon to the soil anyway, if sustainability is a priority.
Methanol is only one of many products of destructive distillation. Gasification can produce syngas (CO+H2) which can make desired products by catalytic synthesis. There are off-the-shelf reactors for making methanol from syngas, and the yield of the desired product will be much greater.
Solar + Wind + Tidal + EVs + PLHVs = the answer.
Intermittent renewable energy stored across the land in vehicle batteries vis a vis V2G technology. (Oh oh - I said that word).
At scale, forget biofuels.
Oh -the rigs no longer looking for oil can mine lithium from the ocean. Once out, it, like all other non-radioactive elements, is recyclable.
Great work, Robert, and to Euan's article also.
Solar + Wind + Tidal + EVs + PLHVs = the answer.
Intermittent renewable energy stored across the land in vehicle batteries vis a vis V2G technology. (Oh oh - I said that word).
There is probably no way we'll run a global economy AWKI (as we know it) on that kind of setup.
Not saying we need to, but thems the breaks.
Agreed. Welcome to a new world. Heck even the Amish are embracing solar, maybe electric buggies will be next.
"There is probably no way we'll run a global economy AWKI (as we know it) on that kind of setup."
It looks to me like we can. Would you like to elaborate with numbers?
See recent reports by ACORE summerized here and EPRI here. Will post some graphics.
click to enlarge
Try this and this for above graphics.
John, were you agreeing with me, or disagreeing?
I don't see anything here that limits wind or solar. The ACORE report simply projects the amount that could be developed by 2025 based on current growth rates: there's no indications of limits to market penetration.
The EPRI report is intended to analyze the effects of various amounts of PHEV's. They simply assume certain market penetrations, and don't present any limits.
I think the authors of both of these are very optimistic about the long term usefulness of wind, solar or PHEV's.
Nick, the ACORE report states the potential for renewables by 2025, based on input from a number of credible stakeholders. I don't think this meant as a limit.
The EPRI report does look at high and low cases of EV market penetration (an assumption on their part) to assess CO2 and GHG reduction.
Combined, and mindful of GW and peak oil (of which by my watch we're 20 months past), these provide a one-two punch that may light a fire under Congress to agree on an energy package with guts. It is certainly being incorporated into thinking and plans at the State level.
It will be a new world, and probably not one where people are at each other's throats.
In a scientific taxonomy of energy sources, wind IS solar, but with a twist: global warming WILL change weather patterns and therefore wind patterns. The siting of wind farms based on historic weather data may turn out to be sub-optimal for the future.
equal to solar...
constructed turbines can be moved, they do not become magically useless and broken if the wind stops.
now how far they can economically be moved is another story.
Why isn't the developing world (Africa) powering up this way, then? Why is Iran investing in nuclear and not solar?
If it's feasible to run a world-class economy on solar/tidal/wind, then why aren't China and India building solar/tidal/wind over coal/NG?
gr1nn3r
Africa:
When most of the peeople are deperately poor, under $5.00 a day, how can they invest in anything.Bob Ebersole
Iran:
they may be investing in solar and wind as well as nuclear, but who can tell? Do you remember all the WMD that were never found in Iraq, or the yellow cake uranium supposedly bought from Niger?
Excellent! This is exactly my point. If solar is ready in the here and now, then why can't countries/villages/regions in Africa build some energy wealth by deploying solar energy?
Do they need outside assistance? Some sort of bootstrapping? Will we need a similar kind of bootstrapping?
To anticipate a response, is social cohesion and corruption the problem? Will we be able to maintain our level of civility on the downward slope of the oil curve. Is our sophistication due to our energy wealth?
I don't really expect answers, but it's food for thought.
Thought experiment: How about plopping down a solar panel factory somewhere in Africa. It'll be a hot item in the coming years, and I'm sure land and labor are available at great prices.
Solar cell fabrication plants are a little bit energy hungry. Normally cells take a little under 2 years to pay back what was used to make them. So, you need a source of cheap power to build a plant. You also need a source of solar grade silicon. Making this is getting easier, but it is also a pretty demanding industrial effort. The costs in are still material and energy more than labor so you don't always gain by going offshore.
From the little I've read about analyzing the payback time for solar it sounds like substantial energy is also tied up in the aluminum support structures and other parts of the system in addition to the silicon.
However, I do agree that this should be a real positive for equatorial countries. From a simple resource standpoint they have enormous amounts of solar energy landing within their borders but it is difficult to use. It's like saying they have proven oil reserves which are miles deep under miles of ocean. Lots of energy but not easy to get to.
aluminum is recyclable however, and smelting new from old is much less costly than mining new stuff.
the only good thing i could think of.
If solar is ready in the here and now, then why can't countries/villages/regions in Africa build some energy wealth by deploying solar energy?
Individual villages have. Lights at night, 10 foot parabolic reflectors to cook with, running water pumps for crops.
http://journeytoforever.org/sc_link.html
http://www.princeindia.org/Balcony%20cooker%20article.pdf
http://www.princeindia.org/newproducts.htm
(Adding links to the Scheffler Community cooking system because I spent too damn long looking it up this time)
Thought experiment: How about plopping down a solar panel factory somewhere in Africa.
Companies won't do it because of the history of a lack of stable governments and taxation structures. Not to mention a relative lack of human capitol in the form of trained (or trainable) workers. Much of Africa lacks 2-3 generations of families being well fed and educated.
Hi gr,
Thanks and is this a rhetorical question?
There could be a lot of reasons - the same factors that keep us on this oil-gobbling path. Also, could be that in the short term the FF are more net energy return, but this won't last long. It could be "they" don't see that what FF there are should be used to put in place the only infrastructure(s) that can conceivably work on any scale, namely (at least for purposes of this discussion), solar/(possibly wind)-related ones.
Also, the aspects of design and (let me just say it) the social/cultural/legal aspects, such as legal rights of women - (as I tie that directly to population, quality of life and savings of all sorts) - enter into any discussion of what has to happen to maintain "world-class" economy. Or, "world-class" civilization, perhaps.
What does "world-class" economy mean?
Does it mean strictly local food production, less manufacturing in total? Does it mean incorporating composting into sewage treatment? Does it mean providing
food, clothing shelter and then the icing is scientific research? Or does it mean...?
Hi again gr,
I basically like your questions, it's just that I'd encourage you to keep at it.
re: "Why isn't the developing world (Africa) powering up this way, then?"
Well, look. Who in Africa sells Africa's oil to whom? And why?
Then, perhaps we could answer this.
Who is in a position (in the real world) to make the changes that might bode better (if not well) for humanity?
In theory, everyone. In practicality, some are better placed than others.
Well why aren't we deploying solar technology in our homes and offices if it is ready in the here and now?
Everyone hates being dependent on "foreign-oil" and contributing to global warming.
Why are we and China investing money in new coal power plants rather that solar/tidal plants?
I think there are plenty of people hawking solar technology. People aren't buying because it isn't good enough yet to replace the status-quo (fossil fuel power). That's my point.
Finally, I would consider a world-class economy to be a high-technology economy. For example, Google plopping a server farm somewhere in Niger would be a good start.
India is pursuing a world-class economy and is having (fossil fuel) power problems... why not turn to solar power if it is ready?
I'd guess it isn't "ready" in the sense that there's enough manufacturing capability and expertise for the possibility of building solar farms of sufficient size to provide the equivalent power that can be gained from nuclear (the path India is persuing).
But also there's a risk factor: we know we can build a 1000MW nuclear power plant, and be sure it will generate the expected base-load electricity. No-one's proven that we can build a 1000MW solar farm that can generate base-load electricity, and nobody wants to risk trying as long as their are surer options that don't cost significantly more.
Note that China is already looking at building the world's first 1000MW solar power plant (using solar thermal), at a cost of ~2 billion USD, roughly the same as an equivalent nuclear plant. Presumably the running costs are somewhat lower (although they present far more unknowns).
But Wiz, Joe Sixpack is so forward thinking and rational he's demanding these investments in renewable power. Right?
Not sure what point you're making. Joe Sixpack is presumably less likely to want a nuclear reactor than a solar power plant in his back yard...even if he was threatened with the possibility of higher electricity bills, so I'm not sure how his opinion is going to matter much.
You stressed that the average consumer is forward thinking enough to demand rational energy policies in another thread.
And yet he's calling for neither.
Because he votes for the politician who makes energy policy.
I'm sorry, when did I ever assert that the "average consumer is forward thinking enough to demand rational energy policies"? At most I asserted that the average government is going to do their damnedest to ensure energy is sufficiently available and directed to provide essential services.
Joe Sixpack will vote for the politician that is making the promises that appeal to him the most (well, actually, more likely he'll keep voting for the same guys he always has). If one political party comes to the conclusion that the best way to make up for dwindling energy supplies is to build a nuclear reactor, and the other comes to the conclusion that the best way is to build solar power plants, Joe Sixpack's opinion will make little difference either way.
I thought in a democracy the government does what the people will. Thus a government is only as forward thinking as its voters (ie Carter/Reagan).
You have a funny notion of how politics work. Joe Sixpack never votes for someone that promises him less when there is always someone promising him more. Even if the guy promising him less is right.
Much more likely the choice will be between one party calling for suing OPEC and another party calling for more drilling. Some minor candidate will call for nukes,solar and conservation but he/she won't have a chance.
The average politician will do his/her damnedest to make sure he/she is re-elected. If they put the welfare of their people ahead of the election they tend to have very short careers and are often replaced with politicians that have the opposite priority.
I never suggested that any politician would promise less.
How long do you think the charade of calling for suing OPEC and more drilling is going to last as oil supplies keep falling and falling election after election?
Politicians may do their damnedest to make sure they re-elected in the lead up to election day, but once they're in office, their vested interest is in making sure that Joe Sixpack can at least be fed and keep warm. And any half-competent government will be aware of what's required to achieve that.
Furthermore, after 5 or 10 years of continuous economic turmoil and downturn, the average voter's interests will significantly different to what they are now.
You don't think we'll need conservation of some sort?
Right up to the point where governments collapse. Hell, its obvious now what needs to be done and no one is doing a damned thing. Carter tried to end the charade and look what he got.
Sure they do. Politicians never vote against the interest of the people they represent.
It was the energy policies we set 30 years ago that we are living with today. Politicians look 2 or 4 years into the future, not 30.
Yet they'll be just as stupid, shortsighted, and selfish as they are today.
Besides, mitigation needed to start 30 years ago not 10 years in the future.
That we'll need conservation is well-accepted, and promoted (not heavily, of course) by both political parties here. I can't speak for the U.S. But how is that a 'promise' of anything?
And you say it's obvious what needs to be done now - but it obviously isn't, at least to those that matter. The fact of the matter is that right now we do have enough energy to sustain the way we use it.
Yes, if we'd started 20, 30 years ago at converting our energy sources to nuclear/renewables and our cars to electric, then there would be no real problem to address.
If we embarked on a crash program today, we could probably (at a stretch) avoid any really serious consequences of a major energy supply drop. Well, we haven't, and, you're right, we probably won't for another 5 years at least. So yes, we've almost certainly committed ourselves to a very bumpy future by leaving it too late. But you (and others) appear to believe that there's nothing at all we could ever possibly do that will even save some respectable sort of remnant of a technological civilisation.
No, we fear the most we can do is just "save some respectable sort of remnant of a technological civilization."
But you think at some magical point in the future humanity will pull its head out of its butt and work together to solve the problem. Because, after all, once the economy collapses we'll be able to accomplish everything we couldn't seem to do during the heights of industrial civilization.
Lots of we's there. Who are 'we'? (Sound's like the Who's who are you... if you (...)catch my drift)
There will be no "magical point in the future". Most likely there will be a gradual eroding of vested interests and inertia against doing what we know needs to be done now. And nor is there just "one problem" that all 7 or 8 billion of us will suddenly decide to work together on. Most of us will contribute to solving the problems by being forced to change our ways due to lack of cheap energy, lack of cheap food, lack of easy transport, lack of easy jobs etc. etc.
Sure, there will always be a proportion of the population that will throw their hands up and say its all too hard, or resort to rioting and looting out of desperation. But once sufficient numbers of us no choice but to change our attitudes and behaviours just in order to be sure where our next meal is coming from, your Joe-Sixpack stereotype of today isn't going to last long.
Most likely there will be a gradual eroding of vested interests
No, there will be a HUGE increase of vested interests, just of different kind.
your Joe-Sixpack stereotype of today isn't going to last long.
Right, Joe-Sixpack will turn to Neanderthal or at best Bagaudae.
Yes, I should have said existing vested interests, or "vested interests in the status quo". Once the status quo doesn't look so good any more, or becomes clearly impossible to maintain, there won't be much reason to want to hang on to it.
Let's just hope that Joe Six-Pack doesn't become Joe Six-Scull!
To quote the great H. L. Mencken: "As democracy is perfected, the presidency represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
The time is now, folks :-)
IMO Thompson is a shoe in. It has been set up for him to win by the PTB.
I live in Northern California. Our utility company, PG&E, charges (as I recollect) $14.95 per month to grid-tie a home solar system.
There's two of us in out household and we use from between $14 and $29 per month of electricity at about $0.11 per kwh. We would have to generate almost 136 kwh or solar per month just to pay for the grid tie.
Over a five-year period (life expectancy of a battery system), the grid-tie would add up to $897 -- perhaps more than enough battery capacity for our demand.
There's just me and my wife living in our small house and we both work at home. We don't have any radical energy-saving appliances, but they are fairly new. And we use propane for our heat and hot water.
Conservation is the cheapest form of energy!
To most it's fairly self-evident.
You missed class that day didn't you.
Check, please.
gr1nn3r:
Great point. I think the reason is reliability. Solar power, as you can buy it off the shelf today, is not suitable for providing base load power. Yes, we have a lot of ideas such as pumping water up hill in the daytime and letting it flow down at night, or heating up ponds of molten salt to store heat with which to make electricity at night or on cloudy days.
Those ideas need to be proven out with many installations. Just as GE can come in and offer to build a nuclear plant we need large companies with good track records who can offer to come in and install a 500MW solar plant with guarantees of reliability and uptime. Then bureaucrats can make decisions based simply on cost or the desire to use solar. Currently the choice is a well proven coal or nuclear plant versus a science experiment in solar.
Just now someone is building a 1GW solar plant in California. When there are ten of these and they have a good track record it will be easier to build the next ten.
All you have to do with solar and wind is integrate them with electric vehicles and ice-storage air conditioning systems. This gives you the demand-scheduling flexibility to deal with the variations in supply; the remaining fossil plants can be scheduled with a lead time of hours rather than responding to fluctuations lasting minutes.
E-P, Well put, and I like the ice storage. Could you just keep repeating your message 'til you're blue in the face (from the ice storage, of course)? RR is tuned in, and the silent majority is listening.
Mind doing me a favor, John?
This might be too hard or take too much time. If so, that's ok but if you'd like to take a crack at it, can you describe how society might look if we reorganized around all these other options (other than fossil fuels)? I don't know about you but in my mind, suburbia goes away. Profligate consumption goes away too because our EROEI, while positive, is somewhat lower than fossil fuels. This all implies pretty serious social reorganization, or at least it seems so to me. You may agree or feel otherwise but I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
This is just my personal opinion but a society built on renewables and having a goal (one of many goals actually) of being a sustainable society could very well be "high tech" but it certainly seems that it would be structured radically differently than what we see today.
Anyway, if you'd like to take a shot at what you think such a society might look like, I'd love to hear it, here or anywhere else.
Thanks in advance regardless of whether you take on that burden or not.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Dr. Albert Bartlett
Into the Grey Zone
Will get back to you tomorrow but honestly while I share most of your opinions/visions of what the future may hold, there are many here and elsewhere that have and continue to address this, some quite well. Thanks for asking, though.
Why is Iran investing in nuclear and not solar?
Duh. Same reason you have people pushing fission here.
A big old fission reactor means that everyone around it is dependent on that one reactor. If everyone has solar + a bit of excess capacity and 'shares' the excess on the grid, the government looses control, the power company looses control, et la.
A fission reactor also means money to be spent "keeping it safe from evil_doers" - another way for one group to have control over another.
The shackles of debt, fear, and an 'easy life' (of cheap calories, abundant power, excessive consumer goods et la) helps to keep the rabble in check. A distributed power grid makes for a harder time to control via regulation of one key resource in one location.
Where it all might not end well is when the bread and circuses comes to an end.
Is the plural of circus circi?
I disagree, Iran is pushing nuke so they can get in the nuke club and be feared/respected as they feel they should. If they did not behave like a rogue state there would be no international misgivings about them acquiring the tech.
matt
The simplest answer is that, in fact, they ARE investing heavily in wind/solar, but those industries aren't large enough yet to supply their massive energy needs.
Wind & solar are doubling every 2 years, and soon they will get there, but they're not there yet.
Oh -the rigs no longer looking for oil can mine lithium from the ocean.
I have seen suggestions to put wind turbines on them, but I don't know how practical it will be to produce electricity that far from shore. Plus, capital costs for building on the platforms is much higher than for building on shore.
Off-shore wind has much higher public acceptance than coastal. Hmmm - hadn't thought of using wind (and solar?) on rig to run the mining. Now that's probably got one heck of an EROEI.
The environment offshore is extremely expensive to maintain. You have to constantly clean paint and repair things. These workers need food and housing and AC. My vessel burns 20000 gallons a day in diesel at anchor just to run our equipment. This is not even counting what you are wanting to do extracting lithium.
Take an island that is geologically stable set up an electric economy an put in all the wind solar tidal you can with a nuke plant to back it up. Then use the excess electricity produced to extract from seawater. The economic value of this type of mining is probable years out though. The fresh water made would be worth more.
matt
Also,American environmental laws prevent oil companies from just abandoning platforms. The cost of cleaning the rigs up would no doubt be more than building a concrete base like the Europeans do on their offshore turbines.
Also, laws are such that anyone who has ever owned a piece of an environmental hazard like a decommissioned rig is liable for the clean-up. And, its a good law, it protects us all. It keeps operators from just dumping an old platform and calling it an artificial reef, or selling it to an operator that has no intention of cleaning the rig up when production ceases.
So it would require amendments to the environmental laws to make this legally possible. And I, personally, would not support that plan. The risk is too great.
Bob Ebersole
How are off-shore drilling rigs decommissioned and scrapped? In a post-PO world, I would have guessed that much manufactured material must be worth recycling and the cost to clean it up. Would someone really just dump it in the ocean?
On a semi or jack up they take them into a dry dock and salvage or dispose of everything
Platforms on stilts have every module removed then the top section is cutoff. This is also taken ashore and recycled or otherwise disposed of. The stilt part is cut off on the floor of the ocean and toppled over to make a reef. This saves the company money and theoretically is ggod for the ecosystem. The seafloor is mostly mud near the mississippi so this structure allows things to take hold and provides shelter for smaller fish from larger predators.
It is much cheaper to sink scrap metal than it is to transport it ashore, sort it clean it melt it down and reform it. Right now iron ore smelting is way cheaper than that process.
matt
Thanks for the information, matt. Will store and use somehow someday.
Hello JM
Some wind generator info.
EROEI offshore and onshore are almost identical!
A recent Life cycle assessment comparison of an onshore- and offshore 3 MW wind generator gave an energy payback time of 6.8 months for offshore- and 6.6 for onshore.
See details here:
http://www.vestas.com/NR/rdonlyres/CB1E6A32-EB4E-4845-9451-4B5255BBB111/...
With a lifetime of 25+ years the EROEI- is >35-40 times for both. It seems that the higher energy production offshore is offset by the higher energy cost for infrastructure, foundation and maintenance offshore.
But both onshore and offshore are indispensible in the future- and we must build both.
When that is said, I also believe that we have to use all the possible energy sources with EROEI > 2-3 , together with a massive reduction (better energy efficiency and conservation) of societal energy consumption. The more we reduce the easier it is to make solar, wind , biomass heat etc work.
I would put the lifetime at 35-45 years depending on how the maintenance costs scale (Using some kind of accounting anlysis I can't remember the name of right now; you would only choose to replace turbines with new ones when all costs for the alternative are lower than the future costs for the current[which at the EOL is typically maintenance.])
on the flip side, maintenance reduces eroei.
Wow... just started looking at this report. Thanks And1 - will pass on to non-readers of TOD.
V2G is one way of doing it and could provide part of the solution, but pumped hydro is 75% efficient and could provide
MUCH more power to communities. All your wind and solar sources are used to pump water back up to elevation and at night let out to create electricity for the cities. No problem with using renewable energy for everything, including cars.
"V2G is one way of doing it and could provide part of the solution, but pumped hydro is 75% efficient and could provide"
Yes, but a few quibbles: V2G won't be needed for a long time. Just the buffering provided by dynamic charging will help renewables enormously.
Pumped hydro can be 80-81% efficient.
Don't forget power-factor correction. Lines and transformers are rated in volt-amperes, not watts. If you can adjust the power factor on a line from 0.8 to 1.0, it can carry 25% MORE power with no increase in capital costs or losses. The reductive charging system created by AC Propulsion is ideal for this, and V2G is a built-in capability. There is no point in putting the capability off when we can have it today.
Sure. I just don't want people to be distracted by V2G, which will take some planning & investment.
People tend to see the amount of work needed by V2G, and assume that EV/PHEV's won't be able to help deal with renewable intermittency. In fact, just the charging will make an enormous difference, and that can start with a simple timer to move charging to the middle of the night.
Robert,
I agree with you conclusion, solar is the way to go. I would stand up though for photsynthesis. It is not that inefficient. It does about as well as current PV which is why algae can be turned into fuel with about the same energy harvest. (You still lose because the fuel then goes into a heat engine.) But, plants are evolved to be eaten not burned. The rotting of forest mulch, the grazing of cattle, and the predations of insects all provide CO2 for further plant growth. From an ecological point of view, photosynthesis is just a means to fill out a niche, not the be all and end all of existance. It is useful for making structures that bring leaves into sunlight or nectars to tempt fertilizers of fruit to help spread seeds. It is pretty efficient, but it is not the only thing plants do. We can pick crops, like algae, which do little more than photosythesis, and this gets us close to our current liquid fuels consumption, but it seems to me that it makes much more sense to sprout our own silicon leaves, keep the efficiencies involved with this specialization and make liquid fuel use a relatively rare practice. It makes sense in some places, but not here where we can jump past most of that.
It does about as well as current PV which is why algae can be turned into fuel with about the same energy harvest.
But nobody ever got those 10,000 gallon per acre yields that are often cited for algae. Those were speculations based on solving "many R&D hurdles before it can be practicable." That's a direct quote from the close-out report where that huge yield number was taken from. It is based on massively scaling up a lab result, and solving a bunch of technical problems. And I know at least one co-author of that study who says even that was more optimistic that was warranted by lab results.
Nobody every was able to make an economic case for algae that would compete with $30 oil, so nobody's research proposal was ever funded. The world will be different in future, and maybe somebody will try. If they succeed, they will probably not have a salable product. They will be overrun and ignored just like the original discoverers of gold in California.
And then again maybe it just doesn't work.
Hi Robert,
In an earlier reply, you cited theory but I was citing production numbers. GreenFuel has a pilot plant in Arizona. The area is 0.3 acres. I was interested in them because the coal plant down the Potomac from me has to put in scrubbers. A friend at church was concerned that her well would run dry because they planned to draw a huge amount of potable water from the aquifer to run the scrubbers. What GreenFuel is doing has 90% water recycling because they control evaporation and they can substitute for a scrubber since the flu gas goes through the water. So, I called them up. Here is what they are getting in sunny AZ: 6000 gal/acre biodiesel and 5000 gal/acre ethanol. This is what they are producing now. This is not as high as 10000 gal/acre biodiesel but it is much higher than for rooted plants.
As it turns out, Maryland is forcing the coal plant to use grey water and because of the way the land is parceled up near the coal plant, I doubt Greenfuel would be interested in the site. They need 5 acres per MW of plant output for gas fired plants and 8--10 acres per MW for coal fired plants and the land has to be adjacent to the plants. So, they'll do best where land is cheap and it is sunny. This is what Arizona is like. Now, for a 1 GW plant, they'll produce about 30 million gal of biodiesel per year plus ethanol. That is some liquid fuels, but it likely can't replace what we use. It does make fairly efficient use of solar energy if what you are after is liquid fuels. I'm pretty sure they would give you a tour of the plant if you asked, especially since you are writing on the subject.
Call Gary Leung at 857 253 0111.
My feeling is that we should be thinking of liquid fuels as a specialty product. Something you might use if you need to take a trip longer than 40 miles where the shorter trips are electric powered. They should be used where nothing else would do the job, but when something else can do the job, it is usually going to be cheaper.
I'd love to see it go, so I started googling Greenfuel, and got suspicious with this endorsement:
"We got put on the shelf in 1996 when Clinton was balancing the budget and cut way back on renewable energy because diesel was so cheap then," Sheehan said. "The desert Southwest is prime land for this kind of technology and just a fraction of the Sonoran Desert could produce enough algae to take care of nearly all of the nation's diesel needs."
and:
"Sheehan said that the country could produce only 4 percent to 5 percent of its total diesel needs in soybean oil.
"Algae is a tremendously large resource base compared to that and other vegetable oils because you don't have to worry about a growing season," Sheehan said. "And getting a major utility like APS to invest in this is impressive because it means this technology is now in the spotlight."
Nearly all of the nations diesel?
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/1014biz-algae...
Well, apparently they are having some troubles, as of July 1 of this year.
"Unanticipated setbacks with GreenFuel Technologies’ unique bioreactor system led to the layoff of half the company’s 50-person staff and Bob Metcalfe’s appointment as interim CEO, Xconomy has learned, adding detail to what we reported yesterday. Cambridge-based GreenFuel seeks to use algae to convert carbon dioxide emissions into biofuel. However, in the last few weeks, the company was forced to shut down its third-generation algae greenhouse in Arizona, which produced too much algae to handle properly. That was coupled to another blow, in which GreenFuel learned that its algae-harvesting system would cost twice as much as anticipated."
http://www.xconomy.com/2007/07/01/metcalfe-takes-reins-at-greenfuel-afte...
Once again harvest problems, and problems of maintaining log phase growth. I gleaned from other articles on Greenfuel Technology, though perhaps incorrectly, that contamination issues are met with maintaining log growth, which in turn feeds on their light and harvest problems.
I wish them the best going forward, perhaps with carbon credits and more time they can get it to work.
In an earlier reply, you cited theory but I was citing production numbers.
You think you were citing real numbers. But the analysis that I linked to, the Fireangel/Dimitrov analysis, point very strongly at Greenfuel's numbers being overstated. The ethanol number alone is a tip-off. I guarantee you they aren't getting those kinds of ethanol yields. They are projecting that the cellulose in the algae is worth that much ethanol. That's it.
Um, single-celled algae don't make cellulose, do they?
Cellulose is the major structural component of plant cells, found in the cell wall. Algae are plants. Plenty of articles regarding algae and cellulose on the net, too.
Now that I search, I see you're right. But not all of them (some don't use cellulose at all) and the size of the structures to be broken down will be much smaller than for higher plants.
Hi Robert,
You could well be right. The xconomy article doug fir posted suggests that they are not yet handling the full production. On the other hand, projecting ethanol based on an assay of the operational broth is likely to be fairly close. Sounds also like they are getting higher growth rates now too (summer time?). So far as I understand it, they are only planning to ferment the carbohydrates. The used (dried) mash will be burned mixed with coal. Myself, I'd consider leaving it wet to grow mushrooms for a further fermentation round along with protein production.
Myself, I'd consider leaving it wet to grow mushrooms for a further fermentation round
So you have the conversion of cellulose to fungi (Oyster mushrooms on straw with the growth medium then fed to pigs/cows - research on this is documented) but what 'fermentation' process are you proposing?
Biogas? Some form of alcohol?
Just regular yeast. Make a mash of the mushrooms and ferment the carbs. There is some research on mushrooms that self-ferment yielding beer-like alcohol concentrations, but is probably better to use a mash and go higher. The main point here is that people can get this going on their own without waiting for Iogen or Range Fuels to locate in their area.
I'll have to try 'fungus wart' Thanks for the 'pointer'. (And if I ever get a butyl reactor process working I can try for that)
I seem to recall an effort based on growing wild-type algae in open ponds, getting enough biomass for ~5000 gallons/ac/yr of ethanol. Ah, here it is (I can't locate anything recent on Aquaflow, unfortunately).
The biomass product may be biased towards carbs and protein rather than lipids, but IIUC there are ways to turn all of it into fuel. There may be secondary (brewer's yeast) and tertiary products as well.
The article didn't mention ethanol that I could see.
Absolutely, the only way to go with algae is wild algae. But, I wonder what the oil yields are that they are getting, as well as the energy inputs to harvest and extract the oil. My suspicion is that this isn't a pretty picture. The NREL close-out project reported very low yields when they scaled up to the open ponds.
i believe the max seen for any given harvesting period was 50 g/m^2*day. Probably during the longest days of the year in the hawaii or california test sites.
Open ponds were getting consistent ~15-20 g/m^2*day.
(i'm also not sure if it was days or hours for the timescale)
EP,
Aquaflow is the same company I referenced upthread on airline fuel. Although this article does state the product is 5% biodiesel, no word on harvest or dominant specie or species type harvested. No word either on ethanol-only diesel. Please post if should find more information.
"the petroleum equivalent yield from planting all of the world's arable land in one of the more popular biofuel options is just under 30 million barrels per day."
Robert, your analysis of biofuels is wrong because you are considering the world as one unit and that's not the way it works. Present and potentially arable land as well as liquid biofuels usage intensity are NOT evenly distributed around the world. The countries with more biofuels production potential (e.g. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay) have much lower liquid fuel (and energy in general) usage per capita than OECD countries. Therefore if they maximize the allocation of their agricultural potential into biodiesel production (plus sugar cane to ethanol), they will be able to run their current infrastructures FOR EVER, and it is just not reasonable to expect they will forego that possibility. So the people in countries that today depend on agricultural exports from these countries will have a problem.
Please bear my repeating the conclusions from a previous post:
- Once significant biodiesel production capacity has been built, land arbitraging based on farmers' profits per acre will drive the allocation of land to biodiesel crops (soybean, sunflower and rapeseed, SSR for short) or to grain crops.
- From that moment onward, fuel arbitraging will make the price of diesel fuel (however high it goes) set the floor for the price of SSR oils. Land arbitraging in turn will set the floor for the price of wheat and corn.
- There is a food Export Land Model, where food exports will be falling not because rising internal consumption, but because of ever increasing feedstock and land diversion into biofuels production.
- Poor food importing countries, and poor people in general, will be priced out of food.
- The world is NOW at peak food.
- Demographic scenarios of 9 billion people don't stand a chance.
- To minimize future (next decade?) starvation, people should be encouraged to:
Stop building, particularly suburban houses that imply a loss of farmland.
Stop procreating at higher than the replacement rate.
This triggers a thought: There are many inputs to a functioning economy. Some years ago, a new idea burst on the scene, called 'linear programming'. Vast computer programs were written to optimize economic activity. Where is this stuff now? I see no inkling of that work in peak oil discussions.
'linear programming' is part of a much larger set of approaches, sometimes called Operations Analysis. It's very widely used. For example, airline operations are heavily influenced by it.
Hi geek and Nick,
I'd also wondered about this. In a way, it's what Alan does when he talks about freight rail to move agricultural "products" from the CA Central Valley to the coast (LA). But who else is thinking about it as a helpful tool? (Other than the military.)
My guess is, under the current legal arrangements of corporations and states, there's something countering efficiency - if we assume efficiency to be the goal of OA - in the sense that the corporate entities determine their parameters in a different way than we might see as wise, given our understanding of what's ahead. (A corporation "believes" it wants efficiency, but for whom? In other words.)
You could also make the argument that the parameters are everything and that suburbia itself is a result of "successful" OA - only "they" ignored some factors. Like cost of fuel, and also simply having no priority for things we might consider fundamental to, say, local food production, distributed energy, etc.
---edit: In other words, geek, I'd encourage you to look into this. Pick some factors, and write them up for us, maybe?
"Operations Analysis" is also known as "Operations Research" to some actuaries.
NPR had a food expert on a few weeks ago. He said that the US food industry produces twice the required calories per day that we need -- and that the food industry's main focus is spending billions of dollars convincing us to consume it.
Robert,
Thanks for your hard work and scientific honesty, plus your bull dog Aggie tenaciousness. The efficiencies seem to win the debate-the fellows with the methanol or alge suggestions still have to contend with the efficiencies of solar vs. photosynthesis.
Another thing, solar, and its cousins, wind,hydro,and tidal are non-polluting. There is no disposal of waste problem. The only hang-up is the storage, which can be handled with pumped water storage and batteries. Any internal combustion engine produces waste in the atmosphere, particulates and CO2.
There will always be a market for liquid fuel for aviation and possibly for some long distance transportation, and bidiesel and alcohol might be suitable there. But its clear that if we want personal transportation, electric is the way to go. Its nuts to use hydrocarbons any longer-we need them for petrochemical products.
OilManBob, You said it all and you said it well.
Robert,
Thanks for your report.
Woudn't it be better if we take into account only the barrels requiered for transportation? I mean, from those 85 millions only a part is used for that purpose and biodiesel won't be used to generate electricity, obviously.
Fernando
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the U.S. only 3% of our electricity is produced from oil:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/fuelelectric.html
But I reiterate - don't get too hung up on that thought experiment. That goes for Beach Boy as well. We could run endless permutations of that experiment. For instance, I can counter your 85 million barrel argument by pointing out that the net is going to be far less than 30 million barrels will actually be available for displacement because of EROEI issues. We could go round and round forever on that. It is merely to put some sort of scale on the problem.
Yes, of course and I totally agree with you. Actually, I was trying to strengthen your argument for presenting it to non U.S audiences.
As far as I know U.S. consumes a lot of those 85 millions but not all of them, nor all the arable land belongs to U.S. I thought that the first objection to your reasoning would be like the one I presented.
Fernando
Fernando,
The US uses about 21 million BOPD, about 1/4th of the world total. approximately 70% goes for transportation (gas, diesel, jet fuel) and most of the rest is used for petrochemicals. If we would stop using oil for most transportation, we would save about 1/2, 10 mbopd, and have enough demand to set up markets that could supply the world with renewable energy.
This is doable, and would ease global warming very substantially. Use Alan Drakes electrification of rail plan, and convert to electric cars for individuals.
Bob Ebersole
Robert,
Are you putting a chapter in your book on PRT? The cost of implementation is about 3x cheaper than replacing the fleet with electric cars. It could be built in 10 years compared with the 15-20 years it will take the auto and battery industry to crank out 200m new cars. Do we even have a battery yet?
I hear that PRT has a faster average speed than airplanes between SF and LA. Local commutes in electric cars will only get slower as the population grows.
The other advantage is that it requires 3x fewer solar panels to run it.
The third advantage is that it frees up parking lots and side streets for dense housing which encourages walking and bikiing.
http://www.solarevolution.com/PRT/
"Do we even have a battery yet?"
Yes, we do. Check out http://www.a123systems.com/ and
http://www.gm-volt.com/ .
There are a number of others: http://www.fireflyenergy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2...
and
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20070722/tbs-lgchem-volt-7318940.html
ZAP Claims 100 miles on Lithium Batteries from China
http://tinyurl.com/39gncr
the new plug in hybrid
http://toyota.pod.tv/jp/tech/environment/phv/conference/driving_300.wmv
Let My People Convert! - The A123 Challenge
http://www.plugsandcars.blogspot.com/
I've seen those reports. Show me how electric cars are better than PRT. The numbers don't support investing in PHEV or electric cars (even if you can produce a battery) for the reasons listed above. Why throw good money after bad?
PRT may be better than PHEV/EV's, but PRT is a large, slow investment, requiring a great deal of planning and a critical mass. At this point there are no real installations.
While PRT is getting started, PHEV/EV's will be growing very fast. PRT may win in the end, but they will coexist for a very long time, and PHEV/EV's will be much bigger for a long time.
PRT requires computers. In the 1970s the computers were too slow to control cars. How can EVs grow fast without a battery? PRT will rear its head before long. Which today's computer power, PRT will remove the automobile from cities and relegate it to rural areas. Who wants to drive at an average speed of 15 mph? Only an idiot with no sense.
"How can EVs grow fast without a battery?"
The batteries are here. See A123systems, Firefly, GM-volt.com, and my other posts here.
You might also want to check out these guys:
http://www.altairnano.com/
Tech looks promising and they've been able to demonstrate viable real-life applications. What's truly remarkable about this battery are the short charge times - a little longer than it takes to fill your gas tank. This, along with decent range even in a heavy, full-size vehicle might just be the thing that will win Mr Average Consumer over to EVs.
Combined with a serial hybrid approach like the GM Volt (small ICE that only kicks in to drive a generator that charges the battery, which has the added advantage that the ICE can run at its "sweet spot") this solution can give you a vehicle with practically unlimited range.
There are also interesting developments in the pipeline as far as electric motors for vehicle use are concerned:
http://www.worldcarfans.com/2050824.001/1.html
Does it work in minus 20 winter weather? 120 deg in the heat? What about high vibration? you are looking at 3-5 years before they can start mass production. Recycling is another big issue. PRT, with simple technology, can rapidly take the place of commuting before BEV or PHEV get out of the starting blocks. Read those press releases carefully. I think the term is vaporware.
I don't know about AltairNano, but IIRC A123Systems has a low temperature limit of -30°C (and could probably self-heat from lower temperatures, if full-power operation is required) and the Killacycle heats them up to +70°C (+158° F) before runs because that's where they reach optimum performance. AFAIK, there are no places on earth which reach such high temperatures aside from fires, volcanoes, etc.
That sounds pretty good. But how long is the warranty on the A123Systems battery? That is the acid test of how much they believe in the technology. No pun intended.
"Does it work in..."
Altairnano: "Extremely wide operating temperature range from -50°C/-60°F to +75°C/165°F"
"mass production"
Several hundred vehicles this year, 6000 to 8000 next year.
"Recycling"
Altairnano: "no environmental hazards"
"vaporware"
AES (one of the world's largest power companies) has invested in Altairnano and an executive VP of AES is on the Altairnano board of directors.
Interesting, but I don't consider 8,000 per year mass production. How about vibration? Will they last for years? I still think we are 3-5 years from mass production and another 20 years to replace the fleet. At a cost of $8T, I'm not convinced that EVs are the best transportation system that engineers can design or the cheapest investment.
According to one article that I read, Phoenix can get to 100,000 units per year by 2010 (the truck base is made by South Korean company Ssangyong). I haven't heard any problems about vibration, and the batteries are estimated to last for 500,000 miles.
Basically your 3-5 year timeframe started a couple of years ago -- by a LOT of companies. For instance, Enova Systems makes a bus and truck hybrid retro-fit that is being demonstrated in a number of states to raise the fuel mileage by 70% to 100%. Their partner, IC Corporation, makes 60% of all school buses. Enova could, in theory, retro-fit the majority of the existing 800,000 buses, and perhaps a good chunk of existing medium duty trucks (they have signed a deal with an Asian truck OEM just recently to integrate and/or retro-fit medium duty trucks). Verizon (the second largest fleet operator in the US) has already started testing Enova retro-fit converted service vans.
I've read about many companies that are several years into their plans for hybridizing or electrifying big rigs, heavy and medium duty trucks, city buses, school buses, service vans, etc. And anything with a long drive shaft is subject to hybrid retro-fit. The bang for the buck is there -- 2-axle 6-or-more tire trucks use approximately 3.5 times the gallons per year of cars, big rig trucks use approximately 21 times the gallons. Fleet operators aren't stupid, they've been looking into this since Toyota blazed the trail years ago.
"Do we even have a battery yet?"
Not really ... we can power a few mobile phones ... the batteries are hugely expensive and don't last very many recharge cycles. The cost of an electric car with a useful range will be much higher than now, that's partly why there aren't very many of them.
Currently, there are 600 million cars in the world with a population of >6000 million ... therefore only 10% of us have enough money to even buy an internal combustion powered car ... so IMO forget cars when there is no oil (or gas or coal). This will be just a few more years after peak.
If you currently are lucky enough to have a car, make the most of it 'cos you're going to have to learn to live like the other 90%. Your children and grand-children will have to learn to live without fossil fuels, so you might as well start to convert now so you can teach them how to do it ... and maybe leave just a little for them (for things like fertilizer so they can grow enough food!)
Also, solar panels are only say 16% efficient when at the correct angle to the sun ... so sticking them on your roof is very, very inefficient ... nothing like 16%. This is why commercial solar power stations always track the sun ... then you get the (relatively) high efficiencies.
Xeroid.
"the batteries are hugely expensive and don't last very many recharge cycles. The cost of an electric car with a useful range will be much higher than now, that's partly why there aren't very many of them."
Not true.
I believe A123systems is getting around 5,000 cycles before the battery loses 20% of capacity (that's a fairly standard definition of cycle life). They promise 2,000 cycles for power tools, a very harsh application. Tesla says that they are paying $400/KWH for good quality conventional Li-ion. I've seen no reason why A123systems can't get close to that price in the next few years, which would get you $.08 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan (plus electricity costs of 1-4 cents/miles).
Please note that lead-acid is available for $65/KWH, and 400 cycle life, which gives $.16 per kwh-discharge, and about 4 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan. So, we could do a PHEV with lead-acid right now that would be cost-competitive with an ICE vehicle, it would just require battery replacement every year or two, which would be slightly inconvenient.
Firefly says that their lead-acid will cost $100-150 per KWH. Their main selling point is extended life (in addition to much lower weight, and higher power). I haven't seen a cycle life yet, but I would hope for 2,000 cycles. That would get you $.075 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan.
Electric transport is here. Heck, it's been here for 100 years, just not competitively convenient. Now, it's all over but the engineering to accomodate the specific characteristics of the newest batteries to be used.
" forget cars when there is no oil (or gas or coal). This will be just a few more years after peak. "
The most pessimistic projections show 50% of oil production still remaining after 20 years.
"sticking them on your roof is very, very inefficient"
Not really. Just set them at the right angle for noon-time sun, and you'll get peak efficiency at that point. Before and after that efficiency falls due to the angle, but so do light levels. Most of the time it's a worthwhile tradeoff to do away with the complexity and cost of tracking systems.
There are small tracking systems such as energyinnovations.com, but that hasn't been sold commercially yet. Simplicity is often a good thing...
PV panels are available that make use of the sun when on an angle, also the Pv's that score with direct sun, here in New Jersey, we get 130% of electrcity used per annum. so 30% is sold back to the grid. ANd these are the panels that dont turn on untill hit with near direct sun.
Nick,
Altairnano's battery is 20,000 cycles to 80% capacity (good for about 500,000 miles in a small vehicle). Even at the current $65,000 low volume production price, it would only take 400,000 miles to break even (versus 20mpg, $3.25 per gallon) -- and that's not including the other lower cost of ownership for electric vehicles. (disclosure: I own ALTI stock).
On the one hand, IIRC the $65K/battery pack price is overstated: that includes a lot of onetime engineering.
OTOH, 20,000 cycles is more than is needed, so using the full cycle life for cost/KWH calculations understates the cost.
Most importantly, I'm still not quite convinced that Altairnano is for real. They seem to have orders, and be shipping things, but the company looks so flakey!
A123systems and Firefly look a lot more credible. It will take some vehicles on the road for a few years to convince me with Altairnano, or an outside expert with really great credibility.
"flakey"
Their relationship with AES, independent testing by Aerovironment (outside expert with great credibility who testified to the Calif. Air Resources Board about Altair), and the Navy contract that Senator Reid got for them helped me feel a lot more comfortable with Altairnano. Plus the new 30,000 square foot manufacturing locale in Anderson Indiana and a bunch of former Delphi battery folks is another thing.
"20,000 cycles"
That's overkill for most cars, but if you look at delivery trucks, buses, and taxis then it isn't. People are way too focused on Tesla, GM Volt, and so on. The big bucks is in very high mileage fleet vehicles.
And if I am not mistaken, the most pessimistic projections claim that most of this remain oil production will be used internally by the oil producting countries leaving US out in the cold..
Oil for automobiles will surely be a thing of the past in 20 years..
most of this remain oil production will be used internally by the oil producting countries leaving US out in the cold..
Isn't the USA an "oil producting country"?
Declining, yes, but just as every other.
?????????????????
Ah - what's the well-to-wheels conversion efficiency for ICE-based vehicles?
My solar panels are installed parallel to my roof which is nineteen degrees. Ideally, they would be tilted at my latitude which is 35 degrees. The installers say I lose 4% of my power that way, but it is not worth doing anything about. I figure I generate the cosine of 16 degrees or 96% of the available power. Maybe they use the same algorithm. My solar cells are 20% efficient. I have limited south facing roof so I paid a premium for the most efficient cells on the market. Losing 4% means it is like having 19.2% efficient cells. The trackers cost money, take power, have moveable parts that break down. Trackers in the desert get sand in their gears.
California law prevents homeowner associations from blocking rooftop solar installations. Texas, I dunno.
So far as I can tell, Texas does not have a solar access law. You can check your state here.
What? Sealed gearbox units haven't been invented in California yet?
Andy
Of course they have but everyone insists on putting their thermal solar facilities in Arizona.
Nick, even if those A123systems batteries are as good as they claim (which makes them barely adequate for the task ie temp range) there is a lot of engineering that needs to be done.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/02/26/editorial-why-the-carmakers-seem...
And I don't understand why you keep hyping the volt concept car. It's not even a car! Its just marketing hype. A PR stunt to counter recent bad publicity. I'm not saying you'll never see a series hybrid but I'm pretty damn sure you'll never see a volt on the road.
Hi Rethin
GM Design is going full speed ahead with the Volt. Plus they relocated 500 engineers to work the program.
My hunch is that even if a "perfect" battery is not found, the fuel savings from having a fixed rpm ICE powering electric drive motors makes the program worthwhile. There were alot of positive comments on the styling as well so I think its better than even money that some version of the "Volt" will make the road.
Thoughts?
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to see that.
Its not a question of a perfect battery, but an adequate battery.
We'll see a series hybird as battery tech develops. The design makes perfect sense. Everyone know this. The problem is its just very hard to engineer.
The volt was just a PR stunt to counter flak from "who killed the electric car?". Ford showed a concept car for its series hybrid not long after. Only they buried it in the corner and talked very softly about launch dates.
GM can't even get a decent parallel hybrid out the door. The best they do is soft hybrids using old tech licensed from Toyota.
Toyota, the leading hybrid manufacturer, is barely in the prototype stage for its plug in parallel hybrid.
A typical car development cycle is 4-5 years. Throw in new, unvalidated tech and its even longer.
Rethin, check The Energy Blog from a few weeks ago, had a story on commitment (ie $$$) to the Volt. BTW, there's a lot of movement for PHEVs than you seem to see. Do you know who else is working on this. It's a yes or no answer. Based on response, will respond accordingly.
This one?
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/06/gm_selects_coma.html#more
I see no reference to "$$$". It doesn't seem like much of a commitment to me.
NO. You're making me work now. will be back, and pissed.
Not necessarily true. Fiat managed to cut the development cycle of their new Bravo to 18 months, on the one hand by using CAD and CAE systems only used in aerospace until then and, on the other hand, by reusing proven components from the previous generation platform (something the japanese manufacturers have done for a long time).
One explicitely mentioned advantage of the extensive use of CAD/CAE is that the platform can also quickly and easily modified to accomodate other propulsion systems, for example - which gives your propulsion engineers the time to develop or master the new technology.
If Fiat don't fall on their nose with the risk they took (and so far the first returns from the motor press are that it's a good, well-made car), expect other manufacturers to follow suit and design cycles to shorten considerably.
"The volt was just a PR stunt "
It's certainly PR, but it's not just PR. GM knows that 1)the PR will blow up in it's face if there's no follow through, and 2) they have been saying publicly that they believe in PO, and that the Volt is central to the future of the company. I believe them.
"A typical car development cycle is 4-5 years"
No, a typical model lifetime is that long, but development hasn't taken that long for 25 years. Development time peaked in the 60's, when something like the Mustang took 4 years to get from conception to production, but CAD/CAE (as discussed by another poster re: Fiat) has cut development time dramatically at every car company, to 3 years max. In the case of the Volt, much of the work is already done, and some of the work is being done in parallel. I strongly suspect they're trying to get it out the door in calendar year 2009.
Have you looked at gm-volt.com???
Of course I've looked at the web page. It only re-enforces the idea its a pr stunt.
There is no way in hell they are getting a series hybrid out the door by 2009! Even industry pundents say 2010 at the earliest.
I said the development cycle is 4-5 years because that's what the Toyota guy said in the presentation I linked to the other day.
You're nuts if you think most of the development work is done for the volt. The concept car was an empty shell with a golf cart motor. The powertrain exists only on paper. This thing is pure vaporware.
Venture Vehicles is talking about a prototype running this year, and deliveries next year. That's 2 years from the get-go for an entirely new vehicle, from a company with a tiny fraction of the resources of GM.
I believe that the GM Volt is the real deal. It may not be called the Volt, but some form of the E Flex platform will be announced by 2010.
Lutz has stated this is the most important vehicle in his view or somesuch several times now in the press, so its likely they will have a vehicle in a compressed timeframe just like they did with his baby the solstice. As for the time it takes Toyota to produce a vehicle, well that ain't the GM way :-)
"Even industry pundents say 2010 at the earliest."
No, the "pundents" quote GM, and GM simply said they were following a normal development process, which the "pundents" know is about 3 years. Then GM said 2010, and lately they've stopped giving a date, saying it's a trade secret. When you combine that with known info about accelerated development, it's pretty clear they're aiming for before 2010.
"I said the development cycle is 4-5 years because that's what the Toyota guy said in the presentation I linked to the other day. "
No, he said that's the normal product cycle. They keep products on the road longer than they have to because it's much cheaper & more profitable that way. That's an arbitrary decision driven by the costs of refreshing products, and the competition.
Again, EV's have been around for 100 years. They're easy. The EV-1 was built only 10 years ago, and had all the current technology that's needed. The only thing new here is the battery pack, and that's very likely to be ready in 6 months. The rest is routine production planning.
Toyota, the leading hybrid manufacturer, is barely in the prototype stage for its plug in parallel hybrid.
Oh?
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/0-0&fp=46ab462beceb4401&ei=sr...
Yeah, its a test vehicle using a NiMH battery with a range of 8 miles.
The reason they are using NiMH in this prototype is because the LiIon batteries they want aren't ready yet.
"its a test vehicle"
It's been certified for sale in Japan.
"they are using NiMH in this prototype is because the LiIon batteries they want aren't ready yet"
No, it's because they bet on old-fashioned cobalt li-ion, and then got nervous. They know that cobalt li-ion has a potential for fires, if manufacturing quality isn't very, very good. They've had a lot of recalls lately, and they don't want to further tarnish their reputation for quality. They're kind of stuck, now, and don't quite know what to do, so they're going with the NIMH that they have.
GM bet on newer li-ion chemistries that are much safer, and is going full speed ahead.
"GM Design is going full speed ahead with the Volt. Plus they relocated 500 engineers to work the program."
This?
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/06/gm_moving_fuel_.html
I see 500 engineers working on fuel cells, nothing about a Volt.
It seems to be that a lot of automakers keep their bets open as far as EVs are concerned - probably out of fear that they won't be able to sell off whatever stocks of ICE vehicles they have if they make too clear a commitment to EVs.
In this context, I read an interesting thing in a German magazine not so long ago - I'll have to dig up the reference. A couple of months back, Volkswagen prestented a few likely scenarios of future propulsion systems, backed up by working, drivable vehicles, all based on the Touran (a minivan based on the Golf (Rabbit) platform). I believe they had a Prius-type parallel hybrid, a battery-powered EV version and a new ICE type, called Diesotto in reference to it being a hybrid between Diesel and Otto (gasoline) engine, which is supposed to combine the advantages of both.
Anyway, the article contained a remarably candid remark by VW's head of propulsion systems development who concluded the presentation by saying that there are two future scenarios for the automobile: it will either be a battery-powered EV, or the automobile will simply disappear as a mode of transportation.
That leads me to guess that someone, somewhere at VW is PO-aware and has no intention to give up their livelihood because of it. If that's true, it's getting time to come out of the closet, guys.
They are all part of GM's E-Flex program under which the Volt falls.
Peeling away one layer of GM is like peeling away at an onion, only the onion keeps getting bigger the more you peel away.
In other words, the Volt is just one layer of a much bigger E-Flex program.
Especially now that Larry Burns is running it.
Sorry for the late reply, I've been away from a computer for a few days.
The argument is founded, but there are ways to solve the problem. Tesla use a sealed Li-Ion battery pack that can be cooled or heated as needed to ensure that the battery operates under optimal circumstances (highest output and longest life).
Rethin,
Don't worry too much about the volt and hybrid or electric cars. There is much more work being done with hybrid buses, heavy duty trucks, and medium duty trucks. These vehicles do way more miles per year than the typical auto.
I am only doing the renewable diesel chapter. I am writing it neither as critic nor advocate. I am just describing the status of various technologies. The closest I come to being a critic is the rapeseed example. But even that is just trying to help get people's minds around the gulf between biofuel production and current petroleum consumption.
Sounds good. 6 months ago, I was a big fan of algal biodiesel and even got a grant to study it. But I'm realizing that it is a niche fuel for emergency vehicles and perhaps aviation. There is no such thing as "wasteland" to grow the stuff. I think the future transportation will be electric vehicles but I'm not convinced that these battery salesmen can produce 200m batteries over the next 20 years. Can we recycle these things? Can they scale production?Hopefully, someone will write a book on transportation and realize that we need don't want more cars. We want smarter systesms. Even if we could build a battery, why do people insist on driving? It is a complete waste of time that kills people, wastes valuable land and destroys communities.
6 months ago, I was a big fan of algal biodiesel and even got a grant to study it. But I'm realizing that it is a niche fuel for emergency vehicles and perhaps aviation.
This is the story I hear again and again: Sounded great in the beginning, but the more I dug into it, the more warts I saw. It is the same for me.
What is your view on batteries? Will Altairnano or A123 be able to produce a battery that works in the winter at -20? Here is a look at temperature effects for lithium ion batteries.
Here's the specs for A123Systems 26650 cells. They work down to -30°C, and you could easily heat them a bit if they were colder.
Robert. I notice that nobody has said anything about wood-or other solid- gasifiers running IC engines. During WWII a large fraction of the Euroean civilian vehicle fleet ran on wood gasifiers, and the Swedes for one have kept up the design capability.
As a backyard hardware guy, I have found that gasifiers are easy to do, and I happen to have a lot of wood. Of course my passion is stirling engines, but I have to admit that the rest of the world worships IC engines, they are cheap and everywhere available, and they run well on gasifiers. Sure, a big tank sticking up in the back of your pickup looks funny, but you get to go.
You can go on wood, shredded tires, plastics, MSW (solid waste) or dismantled McMansions. The exhaust is not worse than from FF.
Right, it takes a lot more work to stuff sticks into a gasifier, but so what? We are already way too fat.
Since WWII the European civilian vehicle fleet has grown by roughly an order of magnitude, and km/year has probably gone up substantially as well.
Ultimately wood gasification (either using the "wood gas" directly as you propose or to produce liquid fuels via e.g. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis) is limited by the amount of biomass that can be grown, and we're back at the central point of RR:s article.
Right, right, right, but nobody is suggesting anything like a complete replacement of FF with wood gas. My point is that if we are to discuss biomass use in vehicles, we should also consider gasification as one mode, along with alcohol, veggie oil and the others. After all it is a process with a considerable history of actual use in large numbers of vehicles during times of shortage.
Do we even have a battery yet?
Oh, if only Airdale was here then he could tell us all about the BlackLight Power battery. (2007 ship date claimed - back in 1999)
http://www.blacklightpower.com/applications.shtml#Batteries
I have to admit that I have come to the same conclusion as you. The problem is that you have to spend some time looking at it, and running numbers before you can reach that conclusion.
I even have a "powered by biodiesel" license frame, and a biodiesel vanity plate. I will give up the plate when the tags are up for renewal (next month, actually).
The algae thing is about the only hope for biodiesel to be anything other than a niche, and even there things are far from certain.
Electric on the other hand seems to make much more sense to me. People talk about battery performance and all that, but I guess my reaction is that if fuel prices get high enough, that folks will gladly accept whatever limitations of electric cars that may remain.
Informative analysis, RR.
As I'm sure you are aware, an additional issue must be that of batteries. It is beyond dispute that attaching a PV to a stationary electric motor (or to an electrified rail line) is clearly preferable to using a diesel or biodiesel engine. The problem, as we all know, is with mobility. Mobile applications need a mobile power source - either a tank of fuel, or a battery. When you add batteries to the PV side of the scale, the balance might still be on the side of PV, but not quite so favorable. Batteries are still something much in need of further R&D.
Some of the battery problem could be mitigated by a simple ground-up re-think about the way we do things. For example, because we refuel motor cars, we think in terms of plugging in electric vehicles to recharge them. Consider an alternative approach. Suppose that electric vehicles are designed with standardized battery packs that can be changed out in a matter of a couple of minutes. One would drive in to a service station, and instead of having one's battery pack recharged, one would just have it changed out with a freshly charged one. The service station could be located uner a huge PV panel array, with a bank of battery packs recharging and ready for swapping. This model (the interchangeable swap-out part, anyway) is similr to that utilized for smaller propane tanks for recreational use. (I use this approach already on a smaller scale. I have some cordless outdoor equipment. Rather than try to power them with a huge, weighty battery pack, I have several small battery packs. While using one, the others are on the recharger. This is SOP for most people using cordless tools.)
Obviously, we have a huge installed base of gasoline & diesel fueled vehicles. Even disregarding the private passenger vehicles and long-haul trucks (for which other & better transport alternatives have been identified), there remain a large number of service vehicles that must be kept running. As many of these are heavy duty equipment with long service lives, we may not have the time to wait through normal replacement cycles. So the question thus presents itself: How many vehicles could feasibly be retrofitted with electric motors and battery packs? I think it is this issue that gets us back around to biodiesel. If we can't get all of the essential mobile equipment electrified quickly enough, then we may still have to be looking at a small quantity of biodiesel purely as a transitional strategy to tide us over until electrification of transport becomes universal.
One final little side comment: I hate to pick nits, but I should mention that the energy content of the oil produced from oilseeds does not exhaust the potential energy to be harvested from the crop. The oilseed meal often has an energy value as livestock feed, and the crop residues could be fed into an anaerobic digester along with manure to produce biogas (methane). I believe that were you to take these factors into account, the overall energy balance for biodiesel feedstock crops would look quite a bit better. Perhaps still not enough to tip the balance in their favor and away from PV, though.
"Batteries are still something much in need of further R&D."
That would be very nice, but not essential. See my earlier post on batteries: they're ready.
Just not affordable
Choose any 2: Price, Performance, Cost
No. I'll repost what I said before:
I believe A123systems is getting around 5,000 cycles before the battery loses 20% of capacity (that's a fairly standard definition of cycle life). They promise 2,000 cycles for power tools, a very harsh application. Tesla says that they are paying $400/KWH for good quality conventional Li-ion. I've seen no reason why A123systems can't get close to that price in the next few years, which would get you $.08 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan (plus electricity costs of 1-4 cents/miles). That's much less than the current $.15/mile for the average ICE vehicle.
Please note that lead-acid is available for $65/KWH, and 400 cycle life, which gives $.16 per kwh-discharge, and about 4 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan. So, we could do a PHEV with lead-acid right now that would be cost-competitive with an ICE vehicle, it would just require battery replacement every year or two, which would be slightly inconvenient.
Firefly says that their lead-acid will cost $100-150 per KWH. Their main selling point is extended life (in addition to much lower weight, and higher power). I haven't seen a cycle life yet, but I would hope for 2,000 cycles. That would get you $.075 per per kwh-discharge, and about 2 cents per mile in a mid-size sedan.
Electric transport is here. Heck, it's been here for 100 years, just not competitively convenient. Now, it's all over but the engineering to accomodate the specific characteristics of the newest batteries to be used.
Mobile applications need a mobile power source
No they don't.
First post here!
Alan brings up a good point I think. Maybe the fact I'm a non-engineer makes me have pie in the sky ideas, but I've been wondering lately whether this obsession over batteries is unwarranted. If you go to San Francisco, European cities, or I'm sure other cities I'm not thinking of, there are overhead lines. Busses, trollies, etc. attach to these lines and run solely on electric power.
Why then could we not electrify our highway system? Clearly many highways already have some level of electricity running to them - the street lights show that.
Cars could be developed that are based on today's hybrid vehicles, but have beefier electric engines. The vehicle would have a retractable power attachment. On an electrified highway, the attachment would extend and it would run solely on the fully powered electric motor. Then, when the vehicle left the grid, the attachment would retract, and the electric motor would "power down" some and a standard hybrid power system would kick in. This setup would have the advantage of allowing a phased deployment. The car would be a fully functional hybrid on non-electrified roads, eliminating the problem of having to switch everything over all at once.
Granted, in hybrid mode the vehicle would still need liquid fuel of some kind, but certainly a setup like this, particularly as electrification of roads increased, would GREATLY decrease oil consumption. And, when electrification reached a "critical mass," the internal combustion part could be done away with, replaced by batteries, which would be recharged while the vehicle was connected to the system to allow some degree of continued mobility on non-electrified roads.
The potential applications are really only limited by size. For example, off road vehicles could have efficient electric motors for highway travel, and have separate internal combustion engines for off road use (this niche market could be a possible application of biofuels.)
Just a thought - I could easily be talking out of my rear end of course!
Sounds like a cool idea to me, at least your thinking of solutions and ideas unlike some people. :)
Thanks for the vote of confidence =P. I think in general people need to keep in mind that we aren't instantly going to run out of oil. In fact, even IF peak oil has happened or is near (a point I reserve judgment on), we will have oil for a lonnng time. The key is to reduce oil use that is largely extraneous and can be easily replaced with other modes (mainly transport), to conserve oil for uses where it is the only option (plastics, petrochemical industry in general).
For example, replacing the long haul trucking industry with electrified rail, and providing my electrified road scheme in metropolitan areas would hugely reduce oil consumption, even if oil was still used, say, by passenger cars on road trips outside of metro areas and by the airline industry. To me, we need to work on reducing oil consumption in a systematic, step by step manner, rather than looking for a single "silver bullet Manhattan project" that can switch us to a zero-oil economy in a matter of years.
Of course, I guess the silver-bullet seekers buy into the doomsday version of peak oil, which is predicated on the inability of the economy to survive oil prices in excess of $150/barrel. I don't buy that myself - I think supply/demand will hold, and demand will be suppressed. Heck, even if gas were to go to $10/gal, just by riding a motor scooter instead of my car for most of my driving I could drive the same number of miles for not much more expenditure. But I digress.. sorry for the off topic! =)
Electrification of highways isn't a bad idea, but PHEV/EV's are much easier, cheaper, and faster.
Really, the batteries are here.
I beg to differ.
Infrastructure cost of EVs and PRT over next 20 yrs.
EV cost of 200m cars = 200m x $25k = $5,000B
EV cost of new highways over 20 years = $840B
PRT system = 1000 miles x 200 cities x $10m/mile = $2,000B
Operation cost
cost of electricity for electric cars @ .20 kwh = $1,440B (150 wh/mile)
cost of electricity for PRT @ .20 kwh = $500B (50 wh/mile)
EV highway operating cost (non energy) over 20 years = $800B (from DOE)
PRT operating cost (non energy) = $500B (wild guess)
EV TOTAL = $8T
PRT TOTAL = $3T
Using back of the envelope, PRT is 3x cheaper than electric cars and we don't have the battery problem. Since electric cars need triple the power compared with PRT it makes the getting to 450 ppm much more difficult.
The economics combined with the scaling issues make the case quite compelling. Biofuels and EVs do have a role for rural areas and emergency vehicles.
PRT at $10 million/mile ???
Where ? Give me ten examples with a dozen to twenty years each operating experience !
That level of operational experience is REQUIRED before investing even a dozen billion dollars. And you want $2 TRILLION for a promoters dream child ? (Whose first cousins are miserable failures).
What are costs of real world operations ? How many years to depreciate ? Cleaning costs (especially after working girls use PRT for "dates" and leave condoms) ? Bird dropping issues ? Ice and snow build-up ? HOW DO YOU EVACUATE WHEELCHAIR PASSENGERS TRAVELING ALONE WHEN THEY BREAK DOWN ?
Fantasy numbers pulled from a promoters dreams.
PRT should be simply forgotten. Built 5 trials in 1970s/1980s and we do not have the money OR TIME to waste on gadgetbahn !
You are anything but a realist !
Alan
PRT seems to be the fusion power of public transportation. An attractive idea that has been tried for decades and still does not work but might work in the future. When it works it wont be usefull everywhere.
PRT is worth small budget technology development and ought to find some odd niche somewhere for almost economical use withing airports etc.
If you are in a hurry in increasing public transportation capacity nothing beats busses and you can run them on biogas, ethanol, FAME, etc. But biogas, ethanol, FAME and so on do not solve the problem with expensive fuels since they compete on the petrol and diesel market and will follow the oil price upwards. And busses are not as attractive as streetcars, has lower capacity and dont have the same authority in a congested streetspace.
Streetcars are the best investment if you believe in a long term low operating cost solution that is as insulated as you can get from the liquid fuel market.
In my home town there is planning for one streetcar line to be run in combination with the already present railway lines wich is a German idea. It will probably at first be built as a bus only road and hopefully it will be as prioritized as a streetcar track that has to have the best right of way but since busses can give some it probably wont. I hope it will be built as a streetcar line early since the integration with the railway tracks makes the investment more usefull then a solitary streetcar line.
And then you have trolley busses, the of-the-shelf inbetween solution.
When I think about it PRT might be more like "The hydrogen economy" they have some attractive benefits but the overall economy is bad and currently it serves as a distraction from immediately usefull large scale investments. But it still makes sense to delvelop parts of the technology for niche uses but that is no reason for delaying immediately usefull investments.
See my post above. For the immediate neighborhood, we do not need door-to-door anything. The existing investment in local streets and roads and sidewalks will serve us fine if we walk, bike, or drive an NEV. NEVs are available now with a top speed of 25-25 mph (fine for local travel) and a max radius of 10-20 miles (fine for local travel). An NEV with that speed & distance limits has a battery pack that is truly affordable even for people with a lower household income than the typical TOD reader. The PV required to recharge such an NEV's battery pack is small enough to also be affordable and to fit on most residential rooftops. At that scale people can even afford a spare battery pack, so one can be recharging while driving with the other.
For longer distances, aggregation of passengers into electrified passenger rail really is the most best way to go. Remember that we need to electrify freight transport, too. The intermodal shipping container is here to stay, it is just too advantageous to not use. We want to minimize the portion of the trip that it must take on a truck, which means that we'll have to keep up and expand the existing rail infrastructure to replace the long-haul freight trucking with more freight rail. In many cases, passenger and freight will have to co-exist on the same rails, at least for a while. It is not ideal, but we just might not be able to come up with the investment capital to do two completely separate systems. We absolutely have to be thinking in terms of making the most of the existing infrastructure and minimizing the needed investment in new infrastructure, because there just isn't going to be that much investment capital available. Don't forget that we also need to make massive investments in building energy efficiency and in renewable energy sources, plus I'm sure the oilcos are going to want to go into the arctic and offshore, plus we have a crumbling infrastructure to maintain. We are really going to have to stretch as a society to come up with all the money, and in hard times at that. We really are going to have to think in terms of cobbling together things on the cheap as best as we can.
Disclaimer note to doomers (that I'll now be adding to all my posts): The above discussion assumes that human civilization will not instantly collapse into extinction in the next few years. It may, we'll see. Meantime, I am assuming that we might actually have some time to manage the decline a little. Your disagreement is anticipated and duly noted.
The problem is the whole idea of a private passenger vehicle for long distance travel. In most cases, for any trips much longer than a few miles, it would make more sense to travel via electrified rail, then walk or rent a bike or NEV or take a taxi once you are at your destination -- just as you would walk or bike or drive an NEV or call a taxi for your local travel.
While both rail and road transport could pull their power from overhead wires, this is not without its problems. Overhead wire systems are vulnerable to wind and storm damage. While they were probably easier to erect in the early days, I'm not at all sure that they are really the best solution for electrified rail systems. As for local vehicular street traffic, if NEVs (and maybe shuttle buses) are just being driven locally, then the battery capacity required is much smaller and much more affordable. If my suggestion of using quick-exchange battery packs is adopted, PV arrays at home can supply most of the needed power, with PV arrays over parking lots can provided metered recharging during the day. Service stations can provide a quick exchange of battery packs if one needs to do a larger amount of driving.
The one case where longer-distance travel in a private passenger vehicle makes sense is in very low density remote rural areas. Even if we make massive investments in electrified passenger rail beyond both Alan's and my own wildest dreams, there will be plenty of people that remain far more than 20 miles away from the nearest train station. They will need long-distance vehciles. The thing is, those population densities are so low that they would not support the type of electrified highway scheme that you suggest either.
The bottom line, though, is that we really won't need our interstate highway system at all -- it will become totally redundant. The concrete will have some limited value as rubble for mini-hydro dam projects, I suppose. The asphalt can be mined as an energy feedstock - America's oil sands. Or maybe we just erect PV panels on all of them, leaving one lane as a service road. That adds up to a lot of square miles for PVs.
Disclaimer note to doomers (that I'll now be adding to all my posts): The above discussion assumes that human civilization will not instantly collapse into extinction in the next few years. It may, we'll see. Meantime, I am assuming that we might actually have some time to manage the decline a little. Your disagreement is anticipated and duly noted.
Overhead wire systems are vulnerable to wind and storm damage
Do you remember the Katrina footage on Canal Street with the palm tree leaning on the overhead wires of the Canal Streetcar Line ?
The Trans-Siberian Railway is electrified, in an area with ice storms and strong winter winds.
Best Hopes for both Overhead wire and 3rd rail#,
Alan
The Long Island Railroad uses 3rd rail in residential areas (not going to happen again). One drunk relieved himself on the 3rd rail. He survived, but with severe burns in the groin.
Alan, I wasn't referring to passenger rail, which I know can be electrified and you know I am all in favor of. Things like fire trucks, ambulances, police vehicles, utility service trucks, heavy earthmoving machinery, etc. cannot be confined to rails, they need greater mobility than that. We also need to keep them running at all costs - if those things are not running, neither will your rail transport!
Don't forget shipping! While we could design new ships with sails and PV panels, they will still need diesel engines for calm cloudy days and nights. And there will be a large inventory of older ships that cannot be retrofitted but will need to keep running for quite a while.
Disclaimer note to doomers (that I'll now be adding to all my posts): The above discussion assumes that human civilization will not instantly collapse into extinction in the next few years. It may, we'll see. Meantime, I am assuming that we might actually have some time to manage the decline a little. Your disagreement is anticipated and duly noted.
Professional videographers have been doing this for years.
The Anton-Bauer battery pack is pretty much the de facto standard for high end television gear.
At any multi-camera shoot I know that I can depend on there being a spare A-B somewhere.
The question is, will there be some form of battery standardization which will be acceptable to all the companies or will one or even two try to force everyone to adapt to THEIR standard a la Sony Consumer Electronics, who insists on doing everything THEIR way while the rest of the world either goes along to get along or fights them tooth and nail until their maverick approach, while sometimes brilliant, dies of from being overpriced and attached to the Sony arrogance.
Can you imagine a world where we have to fight to find that ONE particular type of battery just so we can make it to our meeting on time? I seriously doubt the auto industry will behave any different than the consumer electronics people.
Only the professional drivers will adapt to some form of real standardization while the rest of us will simply have to bow to "VHS or Beta" all over again, only this time behind the wheel.
Let the platform wars begin.
I suspect that even if the industry can agree on standard battery packs they'll manage to screw up elsewhere...
I can already see people walking around going "anyone have a charger for a Honda - anyone?" "Nope, sorry, I have a Ford"...
You see this very phenomenon in battery packs for cordless power tools. A Black & Decker does not work in a Ryobi does not work in a Dewalt etc. I suppose the thinking is that they want you to buy a whole suite of their tools rather than picking and choosing. That is less likely to be a driving force (excuse the pun) in automobiles, as most people will only have one, or maybe two.
Good comment on swapping batteries for recharge. BTW, Pheonix Motorcars is claiming 10-min recharge times (no swapping - just plug it in) for their EV. That's 3x shorter than the average wait time for gas on a Friday afternoon at a typical New Jersey reststop.
[note to self - have now exposed myself to the 'what exit?' jokes]
And what'll the wait time be post-peak?
cough. What is the liftime of these miracle batteries in the cold Minnesota north after years of vibration? How long until OEMs are ready to write a 10 year warranty? What happens if the $10,000 battery dies on year 11?
Dream on! Just to be safe, invest in PRT.
If you were saving $3000/year on fuel over years 1-10, do you care?
There will always be a supply of used batteries from wrecks; if a new pack was more expensive than the vehicle would justify, you could repower with those. The alternative is to invest the money up front and recover the residual value by reselling the used batteries when the car is scrapped.
Just to be safe, invest in PRT
LMAO !!
"Invest" in unproven gadgetbahn that has FAILED MISERABLY in EVERY previous incarnation !
Invest in proven technology, something that we KNOW works !
Alan
This discussion just shows how committed people are to a "gadgetbahn" or other simiarly dubious, grossly expensive, unproven ideas, while the simple, proven, easy stuff doesn't interest them at all.
I'm not a streetcar fan because dedicated surface or undergroud rail (subways) are superior in my experience. They don't interact with other traffic or have to stop at streetlights and such, have much larger carrying capacity (ten cars instead of one) and are thus faster and more convenient.
Still, the ding-ding streetcar is aesthetically much more pleasant than a diesel bus.
One advantage of streetcars is that they are easily retrofittable. The construction costs of subways or right-of-way issues with new dedicated surface rail are daunting. With a streetcar, all you need to do is plop some track on the street, hang wire, and you're good to go.
Elevated railways should also be considered for urban areas. Apparently they have many of the advantages of streetcars (cheap and easy) and also most of the advantages of dedicated rail lines (don't get stuck on the street). The elevated railways of the 19th century were very noisy, but today's versions are much better. They are mostly used in places like airports today.
The elevated railways of the 19th century were very noisy, but today's versions are much better. They are mostly used in places like airports today
Go to Miami. ~20 miles of elevated "Rapid Rail" (subways are Rapid Rail) and <1 mile at grade. Very pleasant to be at treetop level with the breezes waiting on the platform :-)
They want to build 82 more miles and have dedicated a sales tax to do just that.
Every mode has it's place. Washington DC wants to build 40 miles of streetcars to feed the subway stations and connect neighborhoods. It is not either/or but "and".
Best Hopes,
Alan
You don't want a $10K battery pack, you want two $1-2K battery packs. Have one on the solar recharger while driving with the other, and swap out each night. Swap out at a service station if driving longer distances during the day. Or take the train if going that far.
Of course, if you can afford a $100K car, then you can probably afford a $10K battery pack -- or several. Most of our boats haven't been lifted that high, even after 27 years of a supposedly rising tide.
Disclaimer note to doomers (that I'll now be adding to all my posts): The above discussion assumes that human civilization will not instantly collapse into extinction in the next few years. It may, we'll see. Meantime, I am assuming that we might actually have some time to manage the decline a little. Your disagreement is anticipated and duly noted.
The above discussion assumes that human civilization will not instantly collapse into extinction in the next few years.
"It's the economy, stupid!"
Not the civilization (yet).
"BTW, Motorcars is claiming 10-min recharge times..."
With a 10kwh battery pack, giving you about a 40 mile range
to recharge fully in 10 minutes would take a 60kw charger or about 440vac at about 150 amps, give or take.
If you think about daytime recharging, much like refueling at a gasoline station, that might double the electrically requirements for an entire city.
I know everyone says off peak charging at home and that is fine, but to be a replacement for what we have now, this could be the case.
The recharging station would have to have its own set of batteries (charged at night) to charge the customer's batteries (during the day). Problem solved.
I thought at first you were being sarcastic, but perhaps you really are serious.
Such a system is so unfeasible I hardly know where to begin.
Are you aware of the tremendous losses involved in charging a battery from a battery? The costs of such a system would be staggering. If you tried to discharge any battery at the rates needed for a 10 minute charge you'd melt the entire building.
Couple of thoughts on this:
"heating"
The Altairnano battery doesn't heat up. Aerovironment tests at 540 amps show virtually no heating -- charging or discharging.
"staggering costs"
Batteries with less than 80% capacity (used batteries) are not useful in vehicles, so PG&E is proposing to acquire these "worthless" batteries for utility use. One idea is that consumers never own the batteries in the first place, but simply rent them until they are down to 80% capacity.
I hate to pick nits, but I should mention that the energy content of the oil produced from oilseeds does not exhaust the potential energy to be harvested from the crop.
Here is why you shouldn't get too hung up on that thought experiment. True, there is other biomass available. But, the higher meal yields generally correspond to low oil yields. I picked a high-oil yielding crop. Furthermore, the more biomass you extract, the more fertilizer, etc. you have to put back to balance things out. By only subtracting the oil, I can argue that the rest of the potential biomass extracted is equal to or less than the energy value of the fertilizer, and therefore it isn't worth considering.
Land for growing oilseed may cost just a few dollars per square metre while PV panels costs hundreds. So upfront that cuts out most of the world's population from serious use of PV. While biodiesel is a storable medium solar electricity is for a practical purposes a 'use it or lose it' form of energy. Biofuel production may disappoint due to drought or disease. The clouds that reduce PV may be the same ones bringing rain to crops.
Methanol enthusiasts should realise it is quite a nasty chemical. I thought spiral vision was a gimmick in Photoshop until I inhaled some.
So what's my conclusion from practical experience of both solar PV and biodiesel?...bring on nuclear.
"PV panels costs hundreds. "
Actually, PV is much more practical in the 3rd world. see http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/world/africa/20lights.html?ex=13374000...
Yes, I agree with you (here and above). A number of organizations, see for example SELF, Solar Electric Light Fund, have been working to get PV to off-grid locations in developing countries.
That's a strange comparison, Boof.
First, your 'acreage' of PV doesn't preclude also growing whatever crops you want, since the PV doesn't get put over your garden. I know your point is that it's expensive.. yes, that's well known. It's also almost zero-maintenance (unlike the crops), and available in downright TINY sizes, and then addable, if you want to just start with a $30 window unit to charge AA batts and Cell phones, etc.. Keep the Radio and a couple LED flashlights available. The fact that in that one purchase, you've paid for maybe 30 years of harvests from the source has to be included in your square meter assessment.
Sorry if you had a disappointing experience with Solar. You wouldn't be the first. Was it the batteries? Do you know where the panels are that disappointed you, and whether they can still produce power?
Good luck with the Fishin'.. just make sure your licenses are in order! (I kid cause I love..)
Bob
The disappointment with solar is reduced insolation from weeks of cloud, the same time as not much rain. Global Dimming looks certain from my POV. The roof panels are inverted to 240v AC and grid tied. The vegie garden is drip irrigated with a 12v PV system via a deep cycle lead acid battery and it works great, until drought dries up the dam. Even the 12v system wasn't that cheap ($A1000) so I think prices need to come down for the 3rd World.
Yeah, Cloud cover is no help to PV. I live in a sunny, coastal plain.. no telling if it's going to stay that way, though. My most hanging-by-fingernails hope is that if climate gets really 'interesting', that we'll at least have plenty of wind, and the Verticals at www.windside.com claim to have some heavy storm-tolerant designs.. Of course, will we be able to hang onto our topsoil at that point?
Alright.. won't get myself all worked up. I built a fine, little 5-gallon solar shower heater today with all-recycled parts.. time to work out a tree mount for the thing.
Bob
folks, use average insolation levels. there is a nice graphic in wikipedia.
average insolation include cloud cover and seasonal variation. It is not too tough to work out. The +/- is probably 25% on a given year, so some years you have lots of sun, some years you don't, but ON AVERAGE you get a specific amount, and use THAT amount to base purchases on.
" ... bring on nuclear."
But that is a wager that we (the world) will solve our current terrorism problem 100% and forever. I don't like
the odds on that.
So what's my conclusion from practical experience of both solar PV and biodiesel?...bring on nuclear.
I just put up a post on nuclear at my blog. I need to bring it over here. Lots of good debate. My own position is that we will definitely need nuclear going forward.
Thanks Robert! I've long thought the same thing, basically since seeing how low the returns are on Corn ethanol, and how much land it takes. The rapeseed oil example scales my overall concerns to the world's demand for oil.
I believe bio-"liquid" fuel can't be a major solution to our energy demands, even if biofuels in general have long term value in storing solar energy.
Electricity production from solar power for immediate ongoing use is always going to be superior source of energy. Its rather sad we need this FIRST on transportation, while we can't even generate a fraction of our existing electricity from solar power.
Even if we get a high enough solar electrical capacity, storage of surplus energy is the question that must be addressed.
Storage solutions depend on the time scale of interest - 1 minute, 1 hours, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, or even 1000 years! I mean for instance tree wood seem a pretty dense stable chemical storage system for even 1000 years, and you can build nice things out of it while you're saving it!
Maybe someday liquid fuels can be "manufactured" more directly from air, water and electricity? I suppose a worthy question for the famed "Hydrogen economy" is how much land do you need to produce hydrogen from solar generated electricity? (thinking wind turbines, but could be solar boilers, or whatever.)
Lemmie jump on the 'hate algae' train for a bit here.
I firstly refer you to the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
The DZ:GOM is 22,000 sq km large.
It is full of algae and more algae. It is a man made problem. The light penetration depth in water is probably 10m. The density of algae would preclude growth below those depths!
Now for some cool calculations(feel free to fix)
Ghawar
280kmx30km in size. It has roughly 50-60 m of oil bearing rock in that region(i dunno i just guessed from the size and from the Ghawar posts indicating Arab D depths)
Ghawar therefore has ~5.4E11 cubic m of oil bearing rock
the DZ:GOM has 2.0E11 cubic m of plant bearing sea.
Assuming that the GOM waters has 1% plant material (not sure about this number) you get a 2 km to a side cube of plant material! (which mostly grows back every year!!)
hmmm... if the DZ:GOM cannot be harvested, where the material has already been grown, then what chance does land based solutions have? (again like always, i attempt to illustrate an easier way of extracting algal oil than current, and if the easy way does not work, then the harder way has no chance.)
the GOM fishing industry is hurting right now, so someone invest in some hydro-clones and fine mesh nets and harvest that plant matter. It's quite simple. A new reserve roughly the same size as Ghawar is being produced and it's not being exploited. Use solar powered driers and then feed the biomass into whatever for somethings production!!
note: you can send the finders-fee (i just found a reserve roughly 40% as ghawar with probably 80% of it being capture-able) to me in fine gold or silver coins.
Very interesting. Maybe someone could figure out a system of tidal estuaries and sand filters to strain the biomass from the water. For algae in shallow pools the method proposed is to flow the finished growth into evaporation ponds (which I think are not included in any estimate of area needed that I have seen).
I'm sure William McDonough is squirming in his seat. How about ending the N and P dumping from farms? If you improve farming techniques, you could save petroleum based fertilizer costs and end the algae growth.
most american farms overutilize fertilizer.
corn requires a great amount of nitrogen, the major problem is that the entire missippi empties into the DZ. And its watershed is the entire heartland of america.
crapola!
Another excellent post. Thanks, Robert.
If I may share with you one of my favourite commercials, two thirds down this page you'll find PG&E's "Live Better Electrically" ad (and since you're in the neighbourhood, why not check out the one for Texaco).
http://www.tvparty.com/comjing.html
Cheers,
Paul (who purchases 100% wind power through NSP)
Robert;
Thanks once more for a thoughtful and dispassionate topic.
( SI? Is that 'Standard International' units?)
Two more advantages I see with Solar and other forms of Home-generation..
1. This independence seems to me a natural tool to democratize our economy, as long as those invested in it are (edit) NOT JUST the wealthy. While it may seem this is the case, there is a whole sector of off-gridders who have bought into PV (thereby spending much of what wealth they may have had), and are not 'amongst the elite'..
2. A little goofy, but with their durability, I would think you could simply use PV - AS your outer roofing material. You'd have sheathing and a skin layer for weather/moisture proofing, but why not have an entire rooftop using whatever energy is hitting it? (Some for Heat, some Electric), and not spend the thousands every decade or so for Asphalt, etc.
Anyway, on the 'yeah,but' side, we had a great spat start up a few days ago in Southern Maine, where 'the hood' got up in arms about a guys five new Tracked Eyesores...
"SCARBOROUGH � All Laurence Gardner wanted to do was help protect the environment, but residents of the Grondin Pond and Woodview subdivisions say he created a "monstrosity."
http://business.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=122743&ac=PHbiz
"Solar panels in your house are one thing. That would be wonderful," said Jill M., who lives on Woodview Drive, just down the street from five free-standing solar panels that Gardner installed in his yard. "But this looks just like the movie with Jodie Foster in it. You know, with the aliens and such."
"Walter L., whose house on Clearwater Drive looks across the lake at the solar panels, said he spoke with a real estate agent who said the solar panels could devalue his property as much as 50 percent.
"It's just unbelievable that something like this could be constructed in such a beautiful neighborhood," he said.
Yes, the Hardy, Independent and Practical people of 'The Rugged Coast' ... aaagh!
And yet, I still have hope. Actually, the RealEstate comment reminds me of a study done in California about how much your home value goes up with the addition of Solar Panels.. of course, that's California, and today may not be the day to get into home prices, eh?
(There, that's at least TWO cans of worms I've opened up.. Thank me later!)
Bob
One challenge that I haven't seen commented upon very much: Many homes are not well oriented for PV panels. I would guess that something less than 50% of rooflines are oriented E-W. True, one can use some type of bracket affair to point panels on a N-S roof to orient them South, but that adds to the cost of installation. I would also be nervous about those in storms and high winds. I cannot expect such an arrangement to possibly survive in hurricane country, and that corresponds with some of the areas with the best solar potential.
One possible answer is to do some massive remodeling of homes: take out the whole roof structure and reorient the roofline. That will make for some odd looking houses in some cases, but it could be done. It would be hugely expensive, though, and would probably at least double the investment required for already-expensive PV systems. Not good!
Ground-mounted panels might be an option for some, but you run into the same wind vulnerability issues, plus more difficult issues with shade.
This is a big problem that needs to be discussed a lot more than it has been.
It's 2007, and people in the state of Texas, which is possibly one of the most sun drenched in the entire country, are still having to fight homeowner associations in order to install solar panels on their rooftops.
The homeowner associations are winning.
People are more concerned about how perfectly their exurban mansionettes comply with some absurd cornucopian fantasy they dreamed up while listening to neocon apologists for the peak oil denial crowd.
Solar continues to be regarded as some sort of expensive novelty or a plaything for tie-dye wearing hippies who worship compost piles while humming a mantra to Ben and Jerry.
Even Al Gore, the newfound wunderkind for the enviro gurus, has set the movement back at least twenty years by virtue of his conspicuous lack of solar awareness in his own spacious Tennessee home.
We can't even BUY a decent small and efficient diesel car or light truck unless we submit to the old adage:
"You can have any model you want, as long as it's a Volkswagen".
Meanwhile nearly ALL of the models we know and see every day on American roads are available in the rest of the world with a diesel option.
Our soldiers fight insurgents in the Middle East who use indestructible Toyota and Nissan diesel minitrucks as troop carriers and yet these same hardy beasts aren't certified to get the groceries in Anytown, USA.
As cynical as I think I am, I just can't keep up.
The world isn't going anywhere. We're going to just run out the clock until it stops ticking.
Solar is the most realistic genuinely new energy source.
Solar panels are expensive today but there is no particular reason why the price can't go down 80% in the future. Even at today's prices, they are almost competitive.
As I've said, maybe the electric system of the future HAS ALREADY BEEN BUILT. If 30% of today's energy production comes from nuclear and hydro, then maybe we could add some wind and solar to get it up to the equivalent of 40% of today's production. Then we'll just use 60% less electricity.
Using 60% less electricity isn't even difficult. The typical US house probably comes in around 25-30 kwh/day. In my previous apartment, we used 4kwh, without any particular hardships.
If electricity cost 3x today's price, it would just happen automatically. Residential AC would disappear, commercial AC would be set at 78 rather than 72, electric space heating would disappear, electric stoves and ovens would disappear, refrigerators would become 300% more efficient (all this takes is making the insulation in the walls thicker), localized CFL and LED based lights would be common instead of lighting huge spaces, people might hang-dry their clothes instead of using electric dryers, etc.
In Japan it is considered somewhat declasse to use an electric clothes dryer. Wealthy people have special rooms devoted to hang-drying their clothes. This is in part because clothing quality is better there, and dryers are hard on fine fabrics.
Hi Econguy,
What's great about electricity is that:
1) we currently waste so much of it;
2) we have the means to produce it far more efficiently than we do now; and,
3) end-use efficiency will dramatically improve over time (in some cases, it could double or triple virtually overnight).
With respect to the first item, if we put our minds to it, I'm sure most of us could cut our electricity consumption by a third or more and be no worse off for it. Maybe it's different here in Canada where electricity has been, historically speaking, quite cheap but I see tremendous waste at every turn (e.g., how many of us have walked past storefronts on the hottest days of the year only to be blasted by ice cold air because the doors are all propped open?). Eliminate the waste and you eliminate a good chunk of the demand.
In terms of production, new combined cycle power plants are almost twice as efficient as today's thermal units (up to 60 per cent conversion efficiency, versus 33 to 35). While I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, I believe Nova Scotia Power's corporate heat rate is just over 10,000 BTUs (i.e., 10,000 BTUs of fuel are consumed for every one kWh of electricity generated) whereas some of the new GE offerings are rated at less than 6,000 BTUs. A lot of existing plant is fast approaching retirement, so hopefully their replacements will be more fuel efficient (keeping fingers crossed).
Lastly, we have end-use efficiency. Let me offer one small example: When I bought my previous home in Toronto in 1997, the SEER rating of the twenty-year old 2.5 tonne central air conditioner was either 6 or 7 (my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I recall the nameplate wattage was something in the order of 4,500-watts). I replaced it with a similar size, multi-stage 13.5 SEER unit that draws about 2,200-watts (same cooling capacity, but roughly 2,300 fewer watts). If I were faced with that same buying decision today, I might very well opt for an ultra high efficiency, 21 SEER model that would consume less than 1,500-watts, or not much more than your average toaster. From 4.5 kW to 2.2 kW, and to now perhaps as little as 1.5 kW. Could we expect the same three-fold improvement in internal combustion engine efficiency? Not likely.
Cheers,
Paul
Would it be wrong to think that good old natural selection is more likely to catch up with the homeowner associations and their supporters than the individuals with the foresight to install solar cells?
Clearly a reasonable option is simply to consider suicide. It appears, from what you have said, there is nothing you can do. They (you know ... the associations, the 'exurban mansionettes' owners, etc) have decided it all.
You said "as cynical as I think I am, I just can't keep up"
I suggest you find your spine, choose life over death, and get the f**k off the beach.
Great post Robert
Succinctly reduced all the BS to a couple of lines. I hadn't thought of it like that before, but the numbers really are hugely compelling for personal car transport.
With 50% of the world now city dwellers, some liquid fuels will be required for farming and food haulage to the city. Aviation will get some as well, but the sooner we begin our Manhattan project to maximise non-carbon/low carbon electricity the better.
There was a tv talkshow here last night. People ere still seriously discussing hydrogen, the most common misconception being that a (single?) solar panel will generate sufficient hydrogen from water to run the car. Knowledge and understanding of energy is almost nil among the general population.
Yes. We're going to have oil for a long time post peak, trucking and aviation are better uses of it then hauling groceries in a 2-ton SUV. And don't forget railroads for produce transport.
There's a mini-Manhattan project underway: the Solar America Initiative, a DOE-industry-academic-National Labs collaboration to bring the levelized cost of solar electricity to grid parity by 2015.
Give it a look and maybe some support through your elected officials. You can start by asking why no one outside the industry seems to know about it or its goal.
A whopping FIVE MILLION dollars for "winning cities".
Oh boy...bet you could buy a real nice plaque with that much loot.
Sorry but I see clearly why no one has heard of the program, and I can almost guarantee it won't receive anything more than a handshake and a "heckuva job" citation.
Let's all agree that for solar to attain "Manhattan Project" status, A WHOLE LOT more than five million in prize money will be needed. Let me know when our leaders start talking in terms like five BILLION or better yet, FIFTY billion.
As cynical as I think I am, I just can't keep up.
You're two orders of magnitude off on the $ for the SAI, and certainly make the point that few know what's going on. But I agree many many billions (you know - like that going to the Iraq war or into OPEC bank accounts) can and should - so for the price of an email and 10 minutes you can write your congressman and let them know what you think.
Open your windows, com'on and repeat after me:
I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.
Thank you.
I'm good natured and take no offense at your little tongue lashing. How could you possibly know the level to which I've taken things with my own HOA or on other issues.
Unlike Howard Beale however, I've yet to be co-opted or bought
out by any Arthur Jensen types. Besides, the HOA's are a little bit scared at this point and in all honesty it's just a question of out-waiting them.
If you know anything about writing Congress critters you know what a form letter looks like.
I prefer to make louder noises and do so at 29.97 fps with incredible regularity.
The way I see it, solar panels are the new "satellite dish" eyesore issue of the 21st century. Same people complaining, same reasoning, and eventually the same smackdown issued using leveraged market forces.
This is where that so-called "Manhattan Project" could lend a tiny hand, yes?
Fair enough. Certainly I don't know the level to which you've taken things with your HOA, and I'm as guilty as anyone of knee-jerk responses, but your comments were directed at the small Federal $$ for solar (which we agreed should get billons more) and it seemed to me you blew off what is an aggressive DOE program to bring solar to grid parity in 8 years. 8 years. Compare to timeline of peak oil or mitigation in Hirsch report. Grid parity = economic viability = it will be adopted. It’s one answer. And it needs visibility (to date, no else here has even mentioned it, and as I said, I took some offense when you mistaken identified it and the $$ with another solar program).
The barrier for solar is not that it is an eyesore but that it is not yet economic without subsidy. The SAI's goal is to change that. And yes, we need not a mini- Manhattan project but something enormously bigger.
If something like V2G can connect solar and wind to transportation through distributed vehicle battery storage, addressing additionally the intermittency issue and not to mention the peak electric load problems, you are now talking about transformational disruption. And no tailpipe. There are a number of pilot programs underway for V2G, some well-publicitized and some not. I happen to be involved with one on the East Coast. (Financial disclosure, for this work I am paid $0, have 0 stock or investments, and to the dismay of my wife, continue to work on this).
Congress controls the Budget so the only way money can flow to SAI, NREL, EERE, etc. is for them to appropriate it. Okay I agree an email is a lame approach and you are lucky if within a year you get a form letter after you've written to someone once. And hey, it's not like they are not working on energy policy, in the face of demand for money for, take a pick: Iraq, Healthcare, Terrorism... So tell me how to do this, how to get more money for solar (and other RE) if not through Congress? (We'll throw the bums out soon but will it be soon enough?)
Regarding the brilliant Network and Howard Beale's rant, it was the best I could come up with at the time, nothing more. But frankly, I am mad as hell, however quaintly it’s put. Like most everyone else here. Take a read of today’s news list at ThinkProgress.
Yes, batteries seem to be progressing well - with massive FF inputs. Also, where are all the exotic materials for new technologies going to come from?
Same goes for new multi-wavelength PV panels.
(Let's hope the next leap forward in batteries doesn't need Rhodium!)
Is the threshold of a solar panel factory powered by solar panels achievable?
Could the workers live nearby growing as much of their own food as possible?
Maybe, I hope so...
If so, then the next step must be a battery factory powered by solar panels and running 24/7 with battery back-up and electric trucks to deliver the materials.
The "peak oil/peak technology" discussion probably weighs in here.
Hello R-squared,
Thxs for the info. In regards to the lack of power-storage problems: some other TODer said that 'we need to learn how to make hay when the sun shines'. I might add also: 'when the winds blow, or the tide is running'.
Is it possible to restructure our lifestyle so that we can relax and consume beer during the slack times, but work when Nature is being generous with her energy slaves? =)
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I am told that solar panels are as cheap as they are going to get.
One of the elements of "Sustainability" is Economic Viability. If you can't make a product that is affordable it won't sell and will therefore not be available
I am looking for affordable alternatives
Captain Renault: What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
You was misinformed. See post above about the Solar America Initiative (aka SAI).
What happened to solar thermal and molten salt.
Sounds like a great storage idea to me.
Robert,
Since you seem to have a good handle on biofuels, why not discuss biomass gasification vs. silicon PV cells for generation of electricity. That would seem to be an obvious direction to head from here.
Biomass gasification systems have an obvious advantage over PV cells as there is no exotic technology needed to manufacture and maintain them. No clean rooms requiring rivers of water, no huge companies requiring massive amounts of capital and minimal transportation.
2 peasants working in a grass hut in Africa can build a gasifier and run an ICE for electricity generation. They can maintain this indefinitely. Its a very local industry. Rather than focusing strictly on liquid fuels, since you've made the jump to electrification, it makes sense now look at all the issues biomass solves in that arena.
I personally am very negative on PV cells. They are not cost competitive today. However, biomass gasification already is cost competitive given a low cost of labor. That should be telling us something. Ash is mixed with compost and recycled back to the land, thus negating your concerns about exporting the biomass.
The only negative is people in the West don't like gasifiers because it means manual labor to make it cost effective. Automating it in an industrial fashion pushes up the cost too much. That'll change soon enough though as the economy crashes.
ummm building a new engine? the computerized aluminum miller?
new building here, not using recycled materials.
Interesting thought experiment. You also have to give those two peasants a large enough farm to grow the botanicals that can generate their fuel. This goes back to the efficiency issue. Because plants are rather inefficient at storing solar energy it takes a lot of land to produce useful energy. By comparison, one square meter of solar cells will generate about a kilowatt hour per day. Ten square meters could generate most of the power needed by an efficient house and those ten square meters would consist of the rooftop which is currently unused.
I don't agree that PV is not cost effective. It is not as convenient as fossil fuel. Solar power requires a large up-front investment which pays itself off over time.
This is an accounting problem, not an accounting problem. I believe it is in Los Angeles that a large building owned by General Motors (IIRC) is being fitted with PV. GM is not paying for this. An investment company is purchasing and installing the PV. They in turn have contracted to deliver electricity to GM. This is an interesting experiment. Perhaps this is one model for expanding the use of PV. The electric company would install PV on your roof. It would be owned by the electric company and they in turn would sell you electricity generated on your roof. As a home owner you get a stable supply of electricity. The utility gets a source of power which doesn't deplete, it doesn't generate CO2, it provides peak power in the afternoon just when it is needed, it doesn't require investment in long transmission lines and will not fail catastrophically. On any given day a few PV installations might stop working but they won't face a catastrophe like Japan is facing now with the largest nuclear plant in the world shut down because of an earthquake.
IMVVHO, I feel submissions after 12:00 pm/am local time should be highlighted in orange, as per the DHS color code.
Solar power requires a large up-front investment which pays itself off over time.
Kaboom!
Exit the solution in a crumbling economy...
Scale, scale, scale, scale.
If we don't get the scale right, nothing else matters. If we can't figure out the right scale, we will never get it right and it really won't matter if The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe is runs on biofuels or PV arrays.
John Howe has suggested we might aim for an economy using 1/8 the energy we use now and that we embark on a crash program to build that largely in solar. It seems like a gargantuan task - both to build 1/8 and to cut down to 1/8.
At 1/8 the energy, what scale of economy and society can we support?
cfm in Gray, ME
good question ....
I figure these folks could tell us but it would be scarry and the Bush Administration may not allow them to do it
http://www.nrel.gov/
cfm - Perhaps the Amish bound one end of the energy spectrum, as I would guess they use far less than 1/8 the energy the rest of us use. Will try to get numbers.
Perhaps more interesting, the Amish are very religious people, and for them you can not separate religion and lifestyle.
So that raises a question. Can a community live at low energy without a shared belief system, specifically a religion?
You've touched on something important that has been discussed on TOD only obliquely. It is not a religious issue per se, although it does overlap with religion. Perhaps the basic problem (at least as the USA is concerned, though probably not just the USA) is that our values and thinking are so messed up. So many people are so focused on acquiring so much CRAP. The CRAP does not really provide a good and satisfying life at all (indeed, it is counterproductive to such, both for the owner and those that suffer directly and indirectly from its production and use). Even the work we must do in the name of acquiring our CRAP is counterproductive to a good and satisfying life.
The truth of the matter is that those of us in the USA really could live good and happy lives with a material standard of living no more than 1/4 of the present US average.
I'm not just pulling that number out of a hat. Based upon an analysis recently done by Francois Cellier and posted on TOD,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534
the maximum sustainable ecological footprint for any nation is about 25% of the present US per-capita income. Nations that are at or very near that level include Costa Rica, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Cuba (to name just Western Hemisphere examples). I especially commend to you the example of Costa Rica. People there for the most part live good and happy lives. One could certainly do far worse.
If we are not to collapse all the way to zero, I am convinced that the ONLY viable alternative is to somehow figure out how to manage a decline that levels off at no higher than Costa Rican levels of economic activity and ecological impact. I am not altogether optimistic that we can or will do it, but we must try and hope.
An important question thus becomes: How do you make average Americans content and happy with a lifestyle and standard of living roughly comparable with that of the average Costa Rican? How do we make such a life so desirable that people are willing to voluntarilly power down and simplify their lives? How do you make the new life so attractive that people will happily embrace it and actively work toward bring it into being?
I'm not sure that I have good answers to those questions. I doubt that the answer will just involve one particular religion, or a new religion, or no religion. It will need to involve something that cuts across all belief systems. Perhaps it is mostly a matter of giving people a vision of what could be, of showing them that it could be a good life, and of showing them that moving toward such a life is actually more consistent with their own belief systems than the life they are presently living. Again, I'm not sure how to do this or if this is the answer, but it may be somewhere in that direction.
what we lost:
At 1/8 the energy, what scale of economy and society can we support?
At 1/400 the energy, what scale of economy and society did Switzerland supported during WWII?
1/400th was oil.
They also had hydroelectricity (perhaps the same/capita that they have today; but hydro is just half their electrical production today, nuke the other half), a small amount of coal that they traded with the Germans for and wood (probably harvested at unsustainable rates during the war).
They had a stressed democratic society with "modern" industry and a decent quality of life. People were drafted to take trams to the edge of town and trains into the countryside to work the fields on weekends to grow the bare minimum of food.
Not the best of times but far from a disaster.
By 1948 they had increased their oil consumption eightfold (1/50th of US oil consumption). Of course, if the US used as much oil per capita as the Swiss did in 1948, we could join OPEC !
Switzerland of 1948 was a pretty good place and time to be !
Alan
What is the sound of Peak Oil falling in a $90 Trillion Dollar World Bond Market?
What is the sound of Peak Oil falling in a $90 Trillion Dollar World Bond Market?
The Future is Solar
The past was Solar. What's new? Want to discuss the socil co
social consequences of Peak?
Paul in Nevada - Two words: AA
It may be true that the near future "is solar," but are we sure that any kind of agriculture (let alone solar-panel-culture) is sustainable at all?
Far as I can tell, there may exist a few small pockets of sustainable agriculture worldwide, but culturally speaking it's the huge, unsustainable (profitable) operations that generate the kind of large-scale profits which confer strategic power. By unsustainably extorting Earth's resources more than the other guys can, faster and cheaper.
Nobody can really afford to go sustainable, because then the unsustainable guys can unseat you with their "surplus energy?" But, nobody can afford to remain unsustainable forever, because then evenetually the environment is burned out and the surplus is gone?
Bryan
Prof Goose, Editors, can we just have a cocktail hour (24 per day) where we can unload, unwind, drop some thoughts, and then go home?
Hey it is still better than drumbeat here :)
(the three last days of drumbeat has really been ehh ...
special, shall we say?)
Segeltamp, I'm sure it only gets better.
I know you didn't bring this up, but I'm about to drop the D bomb. (D = draft). Anyone who can help here please chime in: Hell no we wont go....
A RECOMMENDATION, AND A PROJECT IDEA
Now that's luck! I am a late night worker, so when I get home, I often turn on the overnight PBS reruns while I fix a bite to eat and check out TOD....
Turned the set on tonight, and got this one hour documentary film on our local KET (Kentucky Educational Television) station.....
http://www.powerofthesun.ucsb.edu/
Hosted by John Cleese of Monty Python/Fawlty Towers fame, and with a nice assortment of folks, some Nobel Laureates, what an interesting and informative film, even for someone well versed in solar terminology and development, and what a great explanatory film for newcomers....$20 bucks for the 2 DVD set (the general one, and a more specialized film for students of science on silicon solar cell technology) I intend to have these two....a bargain education, very good work...:-)
----------
So, in other news, I am looking at a fascinating project and even beginning the planning on it....some old "partners" and other assorted tinkers I have known and myself were discussing an idea, and it is beginning to develop in to something we are going to have to do, just to prove to ourselves that it can, or cannot, as the case may turn out, be done:
If we agree that in an energy depleted world, there is going to be a need for diverse and well distributed infrastructure, we decided that a priceless asset would be a fabrication shop, outfitted with at least a metal lathe, drill press, sheet metal sheers, arc welder, cutting torch, and of course all the normal hand tools and small power tools, such as electric drill, chisels, taps, dies, etc.
Now, here's the trick....could a small shop of such design be built to be stand alone as far as energy goes, i.e., powered by some type of renewable, or locally available energy? Thus, the shop would be an example of what could be done....a nation that would have at least one or two of these types of small fabrication shops in every county, designed so that they could keep functioning even without grid power or imported energy....
It is said that the Brits survived the Blitz this way....that Hitler thought he could stop them by bombing London to the ground, but that the Brits were masters of the "small shop" system, and had fabrication shops scattered all over England, able to build/fabricate about anything....
If such a small shop could be built (we are right now thinking in terms of under 5000 square feet, but the floorspace amount has not yet been set) what type of energy would we use to power it.....
Options on the table are (a)Wood, driving heat and a steam or Stirling engine (b) Solar, either PV or concentrating mirrow mounted beside the shop or on the roof....(c) Wind turbine, or some variety of the above options.....more radical possibility would be some version of Canola/Rapeseed/soy/sunflower grown right beside the shop, and a section of the shop used to press out and use the oils.....(can bioDiesel work on that small local scale....?),
As you can see, this starts to become quite a mental chess game, and we have already come up with some fascinating options in our search for possibilities!
I will keep you folks posted on how this develops, my buddies and I are really getting out heart into doing this, with the limiting factor being (a)money and (b) time, with the first being more limiting than the second!
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
An interesting proposition... I guess it is sort of like vegetarianism - you have to decide how far you want to go. In their most rudimentary form, machines like lathes can be driven with pedal power, though the invention of the electric motor certainly helped with working metal. There are hobbyist machinists out there who challenge themselves with making all their own tools - certainly a demonstration of skill.
If you can get a machine shop working with no FF input then keep us informed. I agree with you that local inventiveness and determination will be invaluable during the hard times.
Your workshop will also need pipe bending and joining equipment, several pumps and presses and a range of tanks and heating devices. Right now I'm trying to figure how to pulverise half a ton of charcoal without buying a new gizmo. Presumably the Amish don't keep buying new stuff without having achieved payback on what they already have. If you are on microgeneration that probably means only running one high wattage device at a time.
I have had the same thoughts about my workshop and I`ve been thinking that this kind of equipment could work for me (woodgas conversion).
http://www.ekoautoilijat.fi/tekstit/kuvatekstit/aggregaatti1.htm
PV, wind, wood and woodgas have all interesting possibilities depending where you are living.
Thanks for the link, that's interesting....
I had seen a few wood gas conversion engines, but none were seemed this nicely arranged or with this much power output, thanks again...:-)
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Any microhydro possibilities near by ?
Alan
"Any microhydro possibilities near by ?"
Yes and no. There is a very nice small stream about 20 miles from the spot we originally planned to use which could be perfect, but the real estate is pretty high, (by my country boy standards, way high!), and of course there are the legalisms....permitting, etc. We have not put the idea off the table though....:-)
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
This museum in Norrtälje north east of Stockholm in Sweden is a complete preserved manufacturer of hot bulb engines powered by a large hot bulb engine of their own manufacture. They power up the engine and workshop during tourist season for prebooked groups and showing it takes at least 1.5 h.
http://www.pythagorasmuseum.se/english.php
A hot buld engine is more or less a crude diesel engine that dont need as good tolerances or fuel with a compression ratio that is too small to ignite the fuel. To get ignition there is an uncooled compartment, a bulb, connected to the cylinder that glows red hot and inside it ignition starts at maximum compression. It can run on any oil. They were mostly used for fishing boats and as stationary power sources for small stone crushers, threshin-mills and so on.
Roger: check out the article "Logging On in the Rocky Mountains" in issue #84 (Aug/Sept 2001) of Home Power Magazine (p. 64). The author built a solar-powered sawmill (using a recycled golf cart motor to run the mill) for under $9K. http://tinyurl.com/2526nx
--C
Energy consultant, writer, blogger www.getreallist.com
Robert,
Excellent and incisive analysis, as always. In the context, here's something that might be interesting:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19095/?a=f
RR
Here's something that is probably not so interesting.
Nonetheless, please consider as background thought for your chapter the idea that harnessing any forms of life for fuel should be valued against the alternative (you know - SUV - Home Depot - flowers - lots of space - whew - what work).
And to never confuse need (i.e. developing countries) with NEED (you know - SUV - Home Depot - flowers - lots of space - whew - what work).
If plants etc evolved with us (generally speaking), maybe we should think and think again about burning them for fuel unless it is absolutely necessary. Of course, absolutely necessary is quantifiable. Just a worthwhile thought we hope.
"Prof Goose, Editors, can we just have a cocktail hour (24 per day) where we can unload, unwind, drop some thoughts, and then go home?" - JM
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Good post. I point you to the small footprint of solar hydrogen production in terms of land use. The study is by Ludwig Bolkow Where will the hydrogen come from available at http://www.hyweb.de/Wissen/docs2007/EHA_WhereWillH2ComeFrom_2007.pdf
Fuel production per hectare is, in my opinion one of the fondamental issues in renewable fuels, as well as water use, of course.
The main alternative to H2 producion is the Bossel-vision of an electron economy, featuring Plug-in Hybrids as energy storage in a CONNECTED NETWORK
http://www.physorg.com/pdf85074285.pdf
http://www.hyweb.de/News/Bossel-Eliasson_2003_Hydrogen-Economy.pdf
This path don't seem feasible to me because a battery incorporates the fuel and the energy convertion in the same place, whilst the fuel cell does not (not considering performance and life cycle).
Regards,
Giancarlo
PS A post in italian was : http://www.locchiodiromolo.it/blog/?p=531#more-531
More references on http://www.locchiodiromolo.it
First off I want to state I love solar power, specifically PV. I was hooked when in the 70's, as a kid, during the oil shock (here in the US) I went to Radio Shack and purchased one of those 2.5 x 5 cm mono crystalline PV cells. I was amazed when I was able to power a small DC motor off it. I've built my own small panels in the past, ordering cells from Edmund Sci. These were small panels, no more than 20-30 watts.
I also agree that PV is likely much more efficient at harvesting sunlight than photosynthesis. I think a good argument can be made that electricity is the most anonymous and useful form of energy we've got, hence PV is a "good thing"
However I get annoyed when I hear people claiming that PV can somehow replace even a tiny fraction of our current capacity. If you run the numbers you'll see it simply cannot scale, especially this late in the game. I think we're looking at a cliff oil scenario - if we were to go the solar route we should have started in earnest decades ago.
This is from a PO thread, someone claimed:
To which I responded:
Perhaps I made a mistake in my figuring.. but I fail to see how PV can replace a meaningful fraction of our electric use. Not even close.
Of course I'm talking about good old proven Si PV technology. Perhaps a newer tech, not yet proven, could substantially reduce the cost? Maybe.
Currently all renewable energy sources are heavily subsidized by cheap fossil fuels. A PV panel remains an energy sink until it's been in use for 2-5 years - and that's daily use. It takes that long to 'pay back' the energy that went into making it.
I just can't see it happening, much as I might wish.
100 square miles is about 2.59 * 10^8 square meters (according to google there's 2,589,988 square meters in a square mile).
100 square miles is 2.59 * 10^8 square meters, but that is 258,998,800 square meters - two orders of magnitude higher than what you used for your analysis. So, you immediately have to multiply your final answer by 100. But I also think your 10% efficiency is on the low side. I know a lot of people with solar systems, and they get higher efficiencies. It won't change the answer by an order of magnitude, but it will bump it up more.
As far as cost, we are spending half a trillion dollars on oil every year right now, and that is going to go higher.
Maybe I've missed a key argument somewhere along the line, but I don't get why PV is the tech. of choice when we start to consider large scale solar electric i.e. megawatt sized facilities...
At this point is not solar thermal i.e. trough collectors or tracking heleostats and a tower or some such the way to go from a cost point of view?
Nothing is decided until shovels are in the ground.
Both thermal options you mention require an order of magnitude more moving parts than PV alone. PV alone only needs the panels, and trackers. Thermal requires the panels, trackers, pumps, a turbine, and a heat exchanger, all of which cost more $$.
Now the million dollar question is, does the extra complexity and cost outweight the higher cost of PV panel/tracker systems alone?
Gilgamesh:
O.K. you have totally lost me, but maybe thats just me... you said:
So lets compare a heleostat farm with tower to a tracking PV farm, in a rough and ready way...
In both cases you have a tracking mech. of some sort pointing some "panels" so that cost and parts count is I'd suggest a constant per unit panel area. Now in the heliostat case the panel is a simple mirror of some sort (I've seen designs that use .003" stainless steel stretched across a mild steel frame, whereas in the case of pv it's a bunch of solar cells wired together, on a supporting sheet of some sort and with a transparant cover sheet of some sortEven the new thin film devices that are "spray painted" together still need to be broken up into fairly small units and interwired to get the voltage where you want it, no one I know is talking about a cell tech. that would put out say a hundred volts per cell or whatever you would need to avoid massive wiring from the panels back to the sub-station. (I suspect there is physics to show such a cell impossible, but can't be sure of that)
Now the heleostat method does have a conventional thermal power plant as well, granted, but the costs of that are well understood I think since its off the shelf plumbing, and parts and costs "amortized" across a whole field of heleostats. Plus the high working temps let you do "off solar peak" generation using stored energy in molten salts or whatever the working fluid is at small marginal cost compared to PV
Finally there is efficiency. I've seen figures of 90% on the mirror to tower leg, if we then assume 30% in the thermal to generated electricity leg we are looking at 27% overall, so to get the same amount of useable electricity from the same farm size you'd need to be getting > 27% from PV yes? Everthing I think Ive read says thats very high...
Hope you understand now why you've confused me.
I believe you are correct that the megawatt utility solar installations in the desert are thermal solar. Since the heat engine needs a hot working fluid to be efficient, it only works in large scale. Large compared to what my house uses, not by utility standards. I can't create a thousand degree molten salt in my back yard. And the neighbors might complain.
They are suppose to be cheaper than solar panels. As somebody mentioned, until there is ten of them and they have been running for awhile, we really don't know how much maintenance they are going to take. Hosing down my solar panels with my garden hose is trivial. Hosing the sand off a square mile of reflectors in the desert where there ain't no water, I don't know.
Parabolic reflectors which focus the sun on a working fluid must track the sun. Or they miss the target entirely. Tracking is optional for non-concentrating flat solar panels. Lot's of moving parts. The heat engine also has moving parts.
Utility solar in the desert have to be connected to a powerline to civilization. And then compete with the wholesale price of electricity. The panels on my roof only have to be economical compared with the retail price the utility charges me plus all the taxes ladled on.
I just did the thought experiment of replacing 100% of our electricity usage. Unless I have made an error, I get a square of solar panels 71.7 miles per side, and $12.5 trillion:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/07/solar-thought-experiment.html
Again, just a thought experiment, but a way for me to frame the size of the problem. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No.
RR - The original Science article posited a 100 mi x 100 mi area of the Southwest with a fill factor of, I believe, 50% and panels @ 10% efficiency. Your numbers seem, as they say over there, spot on.
RR - Actually not completely sure on your $$$ but sounds about right.
There is a very user friendly program at the NREL site for calculating the levelized cost of solar electricity, from residential to utility-scale projects. It takes into account time value of money and generates a pro forma Excel spreadsheet (under project summary) that other sites charge $/month to generate.
It's downloadable for free, and unlike many freebies this one is amazingly functional. You will love it - and try right clicking on inputs - great functions.
See http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/solar_america/analytical_tools.html
I modified the numbers some now, after confirming that 10 hours a day was about double what I should expect to get from the panels each day. I also have the calculation adjusted to account for peak demand.
Robert, I think a comparison to the available rooftop area would be helpful. My understanding is that there is about 100M residential roofs in the US, at about 100 sq M each. That gives about 2TW peak (at 20% efficiency), or about 400GW average output (@20% capacity factor, or 4.8 hours peak sun equivalent per day), or 90% of average US electrical consumption. That assumes 100% usable roof space, but doesn't include Industrial/Commercial roofs.
All in all, I don't think we'll need much desert space, unless we want to use CSP instead.
I am starting to think this is a better way of doing the calculation. Do you have a source on the rooftop space? I think the 100 million roofs is correct, but I haven't seen an estimate of south-facing surfaces.
Robert and Nick,
Let's go with the value 1700 sq ft as typical from census data on the income range $40-60 k. So, that's 158 sq m. Some of these will be two story so the roof space will be half of this value for those. That makes me think that the 100 sq meter number is a good guess. You get to use half this space for an E-W ridgeline oreientation and all of it for a N-S orientation but a lower efficiency. It is really an esthetic choice to decide to tilt panels on the N-S ridgeline oreientation, in which case you get about half the roof used and save a bit on panels, or lay them flush. Sometimes people will opt for a yard mount system. As prices come down, I'd expect that the flush mount will be the most popular. I terms of power output it will be as though half the roof is available. So, the number to work with (assuming shading factors are overcome with yard mounts) would be 50 sq m.
With current net metering laws it is usually unfavorable to install a system that produces more than you use over a year. Our typical installations, meant to meet 100% power use, are expected to be 4kWp systems (about 20 sq m) so these will typically fit, but don't use all the available roof. This might be an even better number to use.
There are 74,318,982 owner occupied housing units and 36,771,635 renter occupied units. Landlords have little incentive to save tenants money on electricity at this point. This is a general problem for energy efficiency as well. So, 74,000,000 would seem to be the number to use.
So, taking 5 hours of sunlight per day, 4kW peak systems and onwed homes we get an average power output of 5/24*4kW*74,000,000=62 GW or about 14% of the national power use. This can be increase by a factor of 2.5 if people are encouraged to use all their roof space (35%) and by another factor of 2.2 if rented and unoccupied homes can be used as well (77%). In fact, commercial rooftop solar isntallations are getting out ahead of residential, but these usually cover 20 or 30% of power use in the building so it is the residential sector that has the roof area resource.
There is a need for a change in how things are done to even make 14%. Only 41 states have net metering laws an only some states have access laws that keep home owners associations from preventing people from installing solar. The Renewable Portfolio Standard and solar access federal legislation being considered (this week and in committee respectively) in the congress could help. Requiring utilities to pay for the excess power (above annual use) generated is what is needed to get people to install systems than are larger than what is needed for the building itself.
I'd appreciate you're checking my numbers. They seem about right from what others usually calculate. Thanks,
Chris
I should note that the percentages are for electric use, not total energy use. If we want to handle that (and we do) then we'll want to look at non-agricultural land such as deserts, brown fields, highway medians, railroad and transmision rights-of-way and such as well as look at how much can come from wind (lots).
Chris
I am starting to think the 5 hour assumption is too conservative. Look at my most recent post at my blog. If you take peak for 5 hours, you will underestimate how much electricity you will produce. Just eye-balling it, it looks like you could assume 8 hours at peak and it would be about right. I need to integrate the area under that parabola and find out for sure.
Robert,
I'm just reading off the NREL map and taking 5 hours as typical. On average, the Sun shines 12 hours, but they are reporting as if it all came in at peak and accounting for cloud cover giving the average behavior of a year. They also break it out by month. I'm assuming 1 kW/m^2 at peak to get the hours.
I noticed that my factor of 2.2 should be 1.6 so we get to 58% of electric production using as much of each roof as possible on all existing houses. So, residential still more than covers itself (as you might expect).
The month may make a huge difference, because I am finding in July that the square wave has to be about 8 hours wide. For instance, yesterday Google Solar peaked at 877 KW, but total energy production was 7021 KWh. I have to multiply by 8 to get that. In fact, that's been a pretty consistent theme this month.
You can see their data here:
http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home
Robert,
How many car rooftops / tractor-trailer rooftops do we have in parking lots across the country? (Think V2G in the open parking lots --and add to at-home capability when parked in driveway.)
How many 1-story massive warehouses do we have in sunny areas?
step back, very good way to think about it.....and don't forget the thousands of square acres of "brownbelt" abandoned industrial area around every city of any size in the U.S......go to South side Chicago, Gary Indiana, or East St. Louis for examples...I don't even want to think of how much would be available in abondoned areas of LA, Philly, Boston or New York.....huge.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Yes, but the economics are location-dependent. So in the SW solar thermal electric is nearly at grid parity, while in the NE or NW, PV panels are more likely to be the tech of choice. Go with what you got.
Oops, so it's ~2600 gigawatts. You can probably scale the average peak down by at least a factor of two because not every square meter can be covered in PV. If you choose a greater conversion efficiency than 10% it would likely drive up costs.. possibly substantially. And the 2600 GW is the PEAK you're going to see for only a few hours out of a given sunny day.. the AVERAGE will be susbstantially lower.
Then there's cost... Assuming a mere $2.00/watt (just for the friggin panel) that's about 5200 trillion dollars .. :(
Tell me I figured this wrong.
And just what is the current US daily electric use anyway?
According to this site...
http://www.eei.org/industry_issues/industry_overview_and_statistics/indu...
So a daily average for the US would be.. > 11,000 GWh/day.
Too short.
There's also the question of whether existing production of PV could scale to produce the needed quantity for a project of this size. Perhaps material shortages would stymie the efforts. 10,000 square miles is huge.
And others have noted, the cost is just for the panels - none of the other very expensive infrastructure is factored in.
So I'm going to stick to my guns here. I think you're being wildly optimistic if you think the rubber is ever going to hit the road on this idea.
I think you have confused billion with trillion. You've calculated 2.6 TW (2600 GW) or 2.6 trillion Watts. When you
multiply by $2 that comes to $5.6 trillion. But, the US uses less than this for electricity so you don't need quite so much. Assuming we're in the desert, you can pick a spot that gets an average of 6.5 kWh/m^2/day for panels or 8.5 kWh/m^2/day for tracking concentrators. Let's take the panels, then your 2.6 TWp gives 22 TWh/day while you calculate the US uses 11 TWh/day. So, your array is about twice as big as you need.
Now, at $2/watt, runing for 25 years you get a price of $0.026/kWh for electricity, cheaper than just about anything else. So, your (corrected) $5.6 trillion turns out to be a real bargin.
If you assume (and you should owing to recycling and improved efficency) that the panels to replace the facility in 25 years cost $0.60/Watt then the way that a renewable energy based economy leads to greater prosperity than a fuels based economy should be apparent.
OK.. phew, let me try to clarify what I meant. Now I feel stupid. Too many zeros to keep track of.
My initial calculations were for a 10x10 (100 square mile) are a which is ~26 gigawatts, assuming a 10% conversion efficiency. Your ~2.6 terawatt figure is for a 100x100 (10,000 square mile) area.. correct?
If so, consider:
First off not every square meter can be covered in PV. So what is a reasonable figure for the percentage that can be utilized? I imagine this could inflate the area needs figured above by a factor of two or more. Though I'll admit this is no biggie. Shoot, what's 20,000 square miles? ;)
I want to clarify the cost. That 5.2 trillion dollar figure is 5.2 TERA dollars (12 zeros), for the 100x100 mile region - not GIGA dollars (commonly referred to as trillion). This only dwarfs the US GDP by a factor of 400. How do you realistically propose to fund this?
There are also many other costs associated with this beyond just the PV. Storage facilities for tera watts of electricity cannot be cheap.
How long would it take existing production to scale up to build something like this in a reasonable amount of time? I think there's a strong possibility of material shortages, as they are already manifesting - look at how the costs of many raw materials have been exploding.
My POV is.. first off I take peakoil as fact. I think we are looking at a "cliff oil" scenario where decline rates are going to be steep. We'll likely be looking at war or economic mayhem because of this. We are already. I just can't take a project like this seriously, I really think you're dreaming if you think PV is ever going to be implemented on this scale - as much as I'd like to see it.
Ahhh, but this is just an example to show that there is more than enough energy. You don't need to encroach on other land use and it is economically attractive. You raise other costs, but if we were to put all the eggs out in the desert, many of them would be the same as for other kinds of power plants. Storage is an issue that gets big if we try to do everything with solar, but mixing in wind an retaining hydro makes the requirements smaller.
I would guess that buying all the houses in the US all at once would dwarf GDP by a factor of 80,000 yet houses do turn over and we don't seem to have too many problems with that until recently. The way it is done is to double up the cost using credit. So, this is the way Walmart gets its solar power. Morgan Stanley owns the equipment. Walmart is happy because they don't have a big outlay and Morgan Stanley is happy because they get back more than they lent. And, they've already reposesed if Walmart does not payup.
Here is an outline of how it might go. This assumes $4/Watt installed and like the desert example it goes with all solar but this time it is on roofs and still costs less than most people are paying for electricity. But, one of the big advantages of solar is that it can ramp up fast. It does not take all that long to get a fabrication plant up and running and the purified silicon supply can go right along with the plant plans.
lol, I've never had any doubt we receive more than enough energy from sunlight to power our needs. It's just the cost of the infrastructure to harvest that sunlight is staggering. And that's just trying to replace a significant fraction of our electric use - never mind the huge amounts of additional electricity required to begin to replace all the liquid fuels we use (say to electrify the auto fleet).
I don't consider biofuels a viable option. I think they're likely an energy sink, and they compete tremendously with our food supply. Globally the population is exploding and already many people starve to death. Biofuels will make this worse. This really only leaves solar and wind (second order solar) as viable renewable energy sources - and they are very very expensive compared to fossil fuels, and they have a much lower ERoEI.
I don't buy the house argument (bad pun not intended). You're talking about shuffling around some deeds and virtual numbers for already built tangible assets. Creating a massive PV farm requires huge amounts of tangible hardware and material, and the energy (more $$$) to make the panels in the first place.
You know that Si PV requires a lot of energy to make in the first place - the hidden fossil fuel subsidy. Apparently it takes 2-5 years of use before a PV panel generates more energy than went into making it.
Yes these things can ramp up fast in theory, whether or not real world is quite debatable.
One idea I've heard about (h2-pv ?) is to use a solar powered fab plant to make copies of itself. Each iteration doubles your capacity. Repeat x iterations until you are close to your target capacity.
The time needed to replace the energy needed to make a solar panel is going to depend on where the panel is installed but a typical time is 2 years for panels in production now. If you want to figure out what the maximum EROEI for a panel is, you need to decide if you are going to recycle the panel or not. If you are, then the energy payback time for the recycled panel will be about 1 year because you don't need to purify the silicon again. So, you want to pick a number converging towards one year depending on how may recyclings you want to do. Also, you need to decide how low an efficiency you are willing to accept at the point you do recycle. Panels will lose up to 20% efficiency in 25 years depending on the altitude where they are used and the backgound radiation because they are disordered by cosmic ray hits and such. If you are willing to wait until it is 0.4 of it's original efficiency (100 years) then you get roughly 25*(0.9+0.7+0.6+0.45)=66 equivilent years at the original efficiency. That would give EROEI=33 without recycling and EROEI->66 with perpetual recycling. If you don't want to use degraded panels and get rid of them after 25 years, then you get EROEI of about 11 going towards 22 with recycling. Often, fabrication plants are built close to hydropower sources because power is cheap there. Should this be counted as a fossil fuel subsidy for solar?
This shows the difficulty with comparing EROEI with other sources because there are assumptions that apply to solar that don't for other sources. For oil, we might be willing to accept and EROEI of less than one at the tail of oil production to keep certain infrastructure going. When we look at EROEI for oil, should we really separate foriegn (30) and domestic (15) sources? Should we look at the entire trajectory of oil use? If we actually need to use energy to remove CO2 from the air, how does this get apportioned? For wind, how do you account for a refurbished turbine (a little like recycling of solar panels)? For biofuels, what may be most important is how much fossil energy goes in. Brazillian biodiesel will soon hit Energy Out/Fossil Energy In=40 though it will still have EROEI=10. But much more of the production will be done using other biofuels.
But, as your own calculations have shown, solar is not expensive compared to coal. It does require an upfront cost while coal requires and upfront cost plus and ongoing cost. You don't notice the upfront cost for coal because the cost of the coal plant is amortized in your bill. But, you can rent solar power, the way Walmart does, at a price competitive with your utility bill. You can finance solar and have your payments come out at the same level as your utility bill or a little less. And, you can be sure that your cost for energy will not go up. This was the reason I mentioned houses. We already finance much more than what solar costs per house so we're not looking at something that is out of range of what can be done. Most solar is going to be on roofs I think, not in large plants. For one thing, it reduces stress on the grid to do it at the point of distribution and for another, it works out better to compete with retail electricity rather than wholesale. When it comes to converting the fleet, you'll be saving money since an electric fleet costs less to run, and again, it does not need as much of a grid upgrade if the power is produced where the care is charged.
Fine, you raise some good points. And we may be talking about different things here. I was talking about attempting to construct a massive PV farm to replace a significant fraction of our electric use. I'm talking more big picture. The 'up front' costs for such an endeavor are astronomical. Yes the ERoEI is good, but that's only after decades of use.
You still haven't answered some of my ealier questions, such as how long will it take existing PV capacity to ramp up.
In fact I doubt that existing production of PV can even make up for the annual growth in electric use! From this site:
http://www.cansia.ca/downloads/report2005/C18.pdf
I found that annual PV production capacity is 550 MW. When you consider that electric use is increasing close to 2% a year this comes out to an additional 81 TWh of capacity that's needed just in the US. Existing PV production is orders of magnitude short just to keep up with growth, let alone replacing the base!
This is what I mean when I say PV is not a viable solution at this point. It all comes down to scale. We have an exploding global population with increasing year over year energy demands. Once we hit peak fossil fuels the net available energy is going to start declining, for the first time ever. PV, wind and other renewable energy sources simply cannot scale to meet this gap. You're not being realistic if you think otherwise.
I also want to say I hate to play devils' advocate on this. I love PV, I'm just aware of its limitations when it comes to replacing oil and coal use.
That is a very nice plot. Thanks!
So, in 2002 there were 550 MWp produced. In 2005 it was 1656 and in 2006 it was 2204.
That is 2 doublings in 4 years, or 1 in 2 years. (I think 2.5 might be closer but we'll stick with 2.) Now, to keep up with the 2% growth we need 9 GW and we're at 2 GWp now so in 10 years we bust past that. In thirteen doublings (26 years) we reach current US energy consumption (not just electricity) and so two more are needed to reach world energy consumption.
One might anticipate a shortening of the doubling time as we gain experience with larger plants and as the cost curve gets us down below wholesale electricity costs.
We do need to start looking to be sure that storage is coming into place within about 15 years so the idea that 40 mile range all electric operation hybrids will be getting going seems a good thing. The folks with 20 mile rt commutes will be running their dryer of the charge they got at work.
Opps, I forgot two things: For the next 25 years, panels will be operational so you want to look at cumulative capacity though this is not a big correction, and panels built before today will need to be recycled though this is an even smaller correction.
At some point, the doubling behavior that is market driven will have to come under some planning, I think, because where you want to get to is enough plant capacity to recycle existing generating capacity as needed and because of the growth and lag, this will need to be managed.
Excellent points, MD. Sorry most of the crowd has moved on and won't see them.
Thanks John,
Solar power is very exciting right now and thinking through the implications is a lot of fun. I'll likely get a summary post up on the Real Energy blog before too long.
Regards,
Chris
Chris, will be on the lookout for it.
One might also anticipate a permanent lengthening of the doubling period as the likely economic mayhem from peakoil manifests. That's my point. Those keen doubling times are great in theory, in practice you rarely see them.
I'll be very pleasantly surprised to see PV implemented on the scale we're talking about. I'm not holding my breath however.
I agree with Robert that you want to get the number of zeros right and also go with 20% efficiency. I also think that you have misses something on estimating costs. $4/W looks OK but high for the next ten years, but then you seem to be using GWh rather than GWh/day to get $50 trillion. Your usage number becomes 0.46 TW so the price is $1.8 trillion. For a 25 year lifetime $4/Watt comes out to about $0.07/kWh for 6 hours of sun per day which is more than most people pay now. So, it is not so hard to figure out where the money comes from. And. this is how to figure it, but the $1.8 trillion does need to be multiplied by 4 or so to account for daily sunshine. You can read a more complete treatment here.
Note that I'm looking to replace all energy use with solar so I go with 1.2 TW, not 0.46 but I do stick with $4/Watt. Like Robert's example with rapeseed, this is a thought experiment.
On storage, you might be surprised to learn what we already have.
Solarbuzz says thin cell is going for $3/watt, but then you would need more land because of the lower efficiency. In any event, with that kind of scale, I would think that solar PV makes would be able to come in at less than $4 per watt, even for higher efficiency panels.
With this kind of scale, all panels would be coming from state of the art fabricating facilities and all current efforts at R&D building of new plants would be speeded up to further increase efficiency.
In any event, we don't need to put everything in solar, especially given that wind will be cheaper for some time to come. And, assuming nuclear is supported the thought experiment doesn't have to be so grandiose.
Further, the U.S. should pick the highest number at all feasible in terms of percentage penetration and then move towards that number. The goal needs to be to make coal obsolete.
Yes, Aten Solar is selling for $3/Watt retail. This has a 25 year warranty on amrphous silicon. Some of the other thin film technologies don't have the durability data yet. I'm assuming $4/Watt installed which is based on a $1.53/Watt fabrication cost for standard silicon in a 500 MW/year fabrication plant with its own raw material supply taken together with some vertical integration savings and efficiencies in installation such as using lifting machinery. Together with accelerated depreciation and aftermarket value this allows competition at $0.07/kWh in the rental model we use.
I agree that wind remains cheaper but it also has to compete at wholesale whereas solar competes at retail so it is ready now. But, a mix of sources needs less eventual storage capacity so even when solar gets to be cheaper than wind (about 7 years from now), it still makes sense to do both. It is worth remembering that covering transportation with solar and wind comes with built in storage while our hydro plants already have about 24 GW of pumpback storage so we are not so far behind as we might think on the storage issue.
I kind of think that coal is going to stick around longer than nuclear just because it is easier to turn on and off. Eventually, neither can compete with renewables on price so they'll both go. Even high capital cost storage that is durable is not going to add too much to the cost for this to come about I think.
Is your rental model proprietary and/or otherwise not accessible? 7 cents a kWh still seems low based on $4/ watt installed, but then I have not seen your assumptions or your calculations that will of course include all other components like inverters, disconnects, and cables.
Given the centralized nature of the massive array envisioned, this seems more like a wholesale vs a retail situation. Sounds like the utilities would need to buy this power and then distribute it region or nationwide. So, you seem to be avoiding all the distribution costs in your calculation.
My utility's wholesale costs are $.045 per KWh, so this is still not competitive in my particular market which is Northern Colorado.
The big array is just a thought experiment. There are such things, but they'll be scaled to meet demand in the South West, not power the whole country.
The rental contracts I'm selling are for residential grid-tied systems in states with net metering. The rental rates attempt to match the retail rates utilities were charging in 2005 though this is a little complicated for utilities with tiered or time-of-use rates. Contracts can be as long as 25 years at these rates. This is a startup, so you can only register your home right now. The first beta installation goes in in a few weeks. When you get on the sales site, linked above, there is a map at the bottom of the page. When you click on this, and then your state, if your utility is listed (there are quite a few in Colorado so you might have to scroll down to check) then you can see the offered rental rate in $/kWh. Your rent is for all the power your system produces. A lot of people find the FAQ under the "Education" tab pretty useful for understanding how the deal works. The main thing is that we compete at retail, not wholesale so that on the solar price curve it works now (with net metering and above $0.07/kWh).
$4/Watt for just the panels and another $4/watt to install them. Are you planning on doing all the work yourself? Even then, a buck a watt for the inverter and a buck a watt for the hardware. 6 hours of sun if they are all in the Mojave desert. 5 hours sounds like a rounder number to work with for a thought experiment.
I'm a proponent of rooftop solar. The land is already allocated. No transmission line losses. No substations and step-up step-down transformers and all that extra hardware. The homeowner is replacing retail electricity rather than a utility generating wholesale electricity. The downside is that we don't all live in the mojave desert.
A buck a Watt for the inverter?? Try less than ten cents:
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=92464
Likewise the hardware, unless it's made for a Cat 5!
http://store.solar-electric.com/xagrtiein.html
Now get out of the toy section and look at the solar grid tie equipment.
The GT 4.0 does 4000 W and costs $2645 retail. The typical life is 15 years (10 years is warrantied) so that's about $1.10 per Watt for 25 years of service. You can separate the intertie from the inverters which can be modular (say 1 per 4 panels) with lower power requirements per inverter and manage shading issues better this way. This does lead to improved reliability and some cost savings, but solar power does require more robust equipment than, say, battery backup applications.
The number to look at is cost of production for panels. For a 500 MW fabrication plant this comes to about $1.50/Watt. If it takes 2 people a day to install a 4kWp system using a modular preassembled approach, that's $0.24/Watt at $60/hour labour (including fringe). Now you are up to $1.75. Add the inverter and intertie at $1/Watt and you are at $2.75. Next count mounting hardware, and you are likely near $3.00 per Watt. You have overhead in system design and permitting, staging yard, secretaries, vehicles, lifting equipment and a 16% sales cut. Keeping that near $1/Watt for a high volume business is not that tough though it won't be easy either. This get's you to $0.07/kWh over 25 years. Now, if you charge $0.11/kWh, which is typical, your margin is pretty good. You're charging 20K rather than 40K for the system (but you get the after market, probably $8K for the remaining 15 years of useful panel life) but you have much lower costs as well. There are also a few financing aspects that go into this, accelerated depreciation and such. Also, remember we used a retail number for the inverter/intertie. Hope this outline helps,
Chris
That's the problem with using a link. The number I am using, $4/Watt assumes a 500 MW fabrication plant. It is the installed cost.
Let's think about what makes solar expensive:
1) You need high purity silcon. This did not used to be a problem when solar panels were made from IC scrap, but now silicon purification is going more towards solar than the IT industry. Silicon suppliers are overloaded and they won't be scaled up for another year. If you purify your own silicon, then you're OK.
2) You need good heat management. If you are running a small line, you end up using more power because there is more surface area for the amount of hot volume. A bigger facility reduces power consumption per panel.
3) You need distributers. There are many retailers who sell panels to installers carrying panels from a number of manufacturers. This gives installers a choice, but the customer has to pay for the cost of the retailer. If you have your own distribution network, you can control this cost. MacDonalds is cheaper than you local diner.
4) You need to sell systems. An installer gets many calls but only a few of these will end up leading to sales. It is the customer who pays for time on the phone with all of those other folks. If you have a commission sales force, you control that aspect so that a slow period does not raise prices.
5) You need to design systems and get them permitted. If each house looks kind of new, then this can take time. Doing the permits one job at a time is also time consuming. The customer pays for this. If you are pulling from a library of designs set to handle most houses, then their is some savings there and if you do permits in batches then you also save time and reduce costs.
6) You need to have mounting equipement that matches the panels you are mounting. An installer I know had a supplier make a mistake. He had everything up on the roof but had the wrong part. Everything came back down and he started again the next day after a FedEx delivery of the correct part. Customers pay for these incompatibilities. If you have a modular integrated way of installing panels you'll avoid this kind of lost time.
7) Intallers tend to use ladders, scaffolds and maybe a hoist. If you are large enough (like SunEdison) you'll use cranes and other lifting equipment. A large residential installer is going to be able to emulate commercial installers in this respect and save on labor. This is one reason Walmart, BJs, Target et al. get a better deal on solar.
8) Customer support takes time. Many installers help with rebates, financing and support calls on system performance. If you have a one size fits all contract that does not bother with rebates, has financing included and monitors system performance remotely, then these costs are also reduced.
Reducing costs all along the way is what allows the company I sell for to offer solar power in markets where the utility charges are above $0.07/kWh, which is most of them.
As you can see, for a 25 year system, this means that the installed cost has to be less $4/Watt.
Hope this explains where the $4/Watt figure comes from.
I do not know if any of you has heard about this, but I talked the other day with a researcher that was working on artificial photosynthesis. He talked about it as a very experimental research, but that if successful it would make very cheap energy. ¿Can someone comment on this?
solar panels are artifical photosynthesis.
the photocenters of plants do the same thing, just with a bit more wavelengths of light, and in a non-destructive manner to the plant cell.
depends on what specifically he is working on. He may be working on dye based photovoltaics, which is interesting, but the materials involved (specifically the DYE) photodegrades, greatly limiting the usefulness, as well the recombination rate is higher with dye based cells IIRC(The charges do not separate as well as solar panels).
Robert, you referenced the Spectrolab solar panels that achieved 40.6% efficiency last year. Other manufacturers are evaluating similar technologies, which concentrates sunlight on silicon using mirrors to improve capture. However, theory and demonstrations are one thing; practical applications are another.
When do you reasonably think we'll see solar panels offered with 25-30% efficiency, let alone 40%? And when will our energy tranmission infrastructure be upgraded so as to minimize energy losses from generation site to the end user?
... The only easy day was yesterday ...
When the military sends soldiers into the field for a three day camping trip, they carry a hundred pounds of gear of which twenty pounds is battery. I'm sure this 40% solar panel is a tremendous technical achievement and of great interest to the people who funded it. Without additional details like what does it cost, I wouldn't assume any crossover into the civilian world.
Silicon panels (without any quantum dots, or beam splitting, or a cascade of different semiconductors, or a CSP concentrated solar power) are theoretically 29% best case efficiency in sunlight. My WAG is we'll see 25% efficient silicon in five years. And anything better than that, never. This isn't meant to preclude them from using CIGS or GaAs or G-d knows what. I'm aware satelite solar panels are already over 30% efficient. NASA pays over a thousand bucks a watt for them.
Robert, what you mean by an electric transport system?
Plug-in hybrids? Reasonably certain the proponents of such own homes. The logistics of getting this to work in the typical outdoor apartment lot seems tricky. Snowplows would bury outlets coming out of the ground if they or someone else didn’t run over them first. So from above? In large parking lots at least this means some means to retract/retrieve the cord. Individual metering would add to the cost. The cost of wiring will be high. For those who have to park on street things get even trickier. It would at best only work for cars and light truck or about 50% of the US oil usage. And I’ve not seen a detailed breakdown of how much oil goes into manufacturing the batteries. You’ve probably seen the study that concluded there is not enouth cheap Li to power our cars with such batteries. And I want to see just how far any battery will take you when it is -20 F outside.
Light rail personal vehicles? I love the idea. But again, logistics. Can’t seem to run them in parallel with the current roads due to space considerations. How to run them together? Stopping distance on rail is going to be much farther than rubber on asphalt due to the low coefficient of friction. Some reason rail won’t work on hills.
If someone knows of an elegant answer, or any answer for that matter, I would like to hear it
Build much more of what works today, here and much more so, abroad.
Streetcars, Electric trolley buses, light rail, Rapid Rail (SUBWAY), commuter rail.
And bicycles.
These will save more energy indirectly via changes in Urban form than directly (unlike pRT if it ever works).
BTW, Rail can stop faster than rubber in an emergency. Drop sand, throw motor into generation mode, apply disk brakes and have meter long high friction electromagnetic clamps on every corner (they do SMELL !).
And every driven wheel rail can climb 10+% grades (over 14% in Pittsburgh).
Best Hopes,
Alan
90% of light vehicles have offstreet parking.
Power at parking meters & parking garages is done now in Canada & Minnesota.
Thank You!
I agree that the future is electric but as I see it the challenge is not technological. I show people a picture of the countryside and ask "what man made things do you see?" and they are power lines and roads, I call it the longest metre (or foot) The distance between the line and the vehicle, What it requires is an intelligent rapid inductive link and power storage, This removes the necessity for carrying all your energy with you, an EV with a sub 10 mile range would be trivial, In cities it could be even less. I doubt it will happen though, because of the inertia of the installed systems
Neven MacEwan B.E. E&E
Try 'the waaay in the future is solar'. Even the best top-notch, state of the art solar cells have an effiency of about 43%. So a little more than half the sun's energy doesn't even get turned to power.
And this is disregarding the fact that if a few clouds roll over - poof! - no sun and no power.
Come back then you can turn *at least* two-thirds of the light into power and have a way to 'bank' massive amounts of it for a rainy day (literally). Then we can talk solar power.
"So a little more than half the sun's energy doesn't even get turned to power."
It doesn't matter if we waste some light - it's free.
Solar power & our consumption are nicely correlated. We won't need storage until solar is at least 10% of consumption, and by then we'll have PHEV's to buffer variance. We'll be able to use existing generation capacity to provide a buffer for much longer, given that solar will be handling our peak demands.
As for storage, if you're not happy with PHEV's take a look at the pumped storage facility at Ludington, MI.