OK, having spent an absurd amount of time bashing on a crappy article that came out while I was on vacation, let me turn my attention to an extraordinarily good one (via HillHeat): "A Solar Grand Plan," by Ken Zweibel (NREL), James Mason (Solar Energy Campaign), and Vasilis Fthenakis (Brookhaven National Photovoltaic Environmental, Health and Safety Research Center).
Some flaw in my character leaves me much less able to analyze things I like, so mostly I'll just urge you to go read it. Here are the nut concepts, though, via the Scientific American editors:
• A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
• A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
• Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
• A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
• But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
In some ways, the authors' estimates are conservative. They do not account for any technological advances or economies of scale beyond 2020 (when the public funding stops and the industry becomes self-sufficient). They also do not account for growth in other renewable sources like wind, geothermal, and biomass. With more optimistic assumptions along these lines taken into account, it's likely that renewables could cover 100% of electricity by 2050.
The authors do throw one hail mary though: the notion that compressed-air and molten-salt storage can be scaled up to massive, widespread industrial application in relatively linear fashion.
That's right, it's our old nemesis, energy storage.
They dismiss batteries with a single sentence:
Most energy storage systems such as batteries are expensive or inefficient.
That seems quite hasty to me. I'm guessing batteries are going to see huge, game-changing advances in the next few years. Batteries and capacitors are still where I'd put my long-term money.
But the authors think compressed air and molten salt are with us now and could be deployed immediately. (For more on recent developments in molten salt storage, see the Energy Blog.)
What do our energy storage experts think?
‘Heretic’ battles straw man
Gore on the Daily Show: extended dance remix
Comments
View as Flat
GreenEngineer Posted 8:42 am
08 Jan 2008
I don't know if this is how it's always done, but basic thermodynamics suggest that this is probably the most effective way to recover that stored energy, so I suspect that it is more common than not.
I mention this only because, using this system, a 100% solar/wind/hydro generation infrastructure isn't compatible with compressed storage (though it could still be 100% renewable, if you're burning biogas). As a practical matter, I doubt it will be an issue -- we'll be burning natural gas (and probably coal gas) for some time to come, just hopefully in ever-small quantities.
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David Roberts Posted 8:51 am
08 Jan 2008
grist.org
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Biodiversivist Posted 8:55 am
08 Jan 2008
because solar, wind and hydro don't use gas turbine engines. They would have to added to the mix adjacent to the storage (real expensive) or existing ones could be used if they were close enough to the compressed air (not likely).
I'm still hopefull of finding a way to use the batteries in homes and cars. Lots of critique of the smart grid idea has surfaced. Would car owners want their battery life shortened by additional charge cycles? On the other hand, if batteries were good enough, many homes would be using them them to collect solar power. In that case, those could also be connected to a smart grid. So, time will tell.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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rgmerk Posted 9:34 am
08 Jan 2008
On what do you base this optimism? The comments of startup companies seeking VC funding?
90% of what startup companies claim they'll achieve doesn't pan out. That's why investing in startups is legalised gambling.
Your beliefs would be more plausible if batteries were a neglected technology bereft of research and VC money over the past couple of decades. That seems to me to be very far from the actual situation. Battery technology has advanced a lot over the past couple of decades. It's still not even in the same suburb as the ballpark, let alone the actual ballpark, of being cost-competitive with standby generation in areas with a decent-size electrical grid.
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Peter Donovan Posted 9:39 am
08 Jan 2008
Briefly: The earth's temperature is controlled by the optical characteristics of the atmosphere (clouds and greenhouse gases etc.) as well as by the optical reflectivity of the various planetary surfaces (albedo). A change of a few percent in overall albedo will have drastic effects.
Photovoltaic panels, being typically dark, turn more watts per square meter into heat than they do into electrical energy. The carbon they save over say coal fired electricity may be canceled out by their heating effect due to their low albedo.
Especially for desert areas, I think most people are ignoring the greater potential of solar thermal power.
managingwholes.net
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:11 am
08 Jan 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Pangolin Posted 10:52 am
08 Jan 2008
For industrial power solar thermal dishes could be combined with geothermal wells. Very large amounts of steam pumped into a well are mostly recoverable months later and heat left over can heat water or houses.
Paving the deserts with solar panels and building massive numbers of batteries is stupid when your solar concentrator is parked on top of an almost perfect storage medium.
You could even make a solar/landfill-methane/hybrid. Heat some steam with a concentrator and it will strip the carbon atoms off your garbage and give you biogas on the upside. Or a solar/CAFO/biogas hybrid or a solar/green waste/biogas hybrid.
Pretty much if you have high temperature steam and a carbon source you can get methane and store that. Since the methane only needs one carbon for four hydrogens you don't have to strip the world of carbon to get plenty of gas. Solar concentrators can make steam cheap and in quantity.
As far as wind power goes a windmill that runs a compressor directly instead of a generator will generate a lot more compressed air. That could then be stored in artificial caves and used to generate power as needed. Natural caves really shouldn't be used for compressed air storage as the blowouts would shoot bats at mach speeds.
A power source profile that relies on more than 1/2 PV is just ignoring cheaper sources of both power and storage. Massive solar farms in the desert is just a means of keeping the powers that be in charge; otherwise it's a stupid idea.
Put the Carbon Back
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LPS Posted 11:19 am
08 Jan 2008
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ce1907 Posted 11:38 am
08 Jan 2008
$420 billion over decades for a pig in a poke, while many powerful lobbies lobby against it. not a good bet
what about the zillion individual systems supplementing the grid?
that seems more plausible to me. a home with some sort of geothermal and solar get up. supplemental funding from the Fed in terms of tax breaks, and maybe some research money through DOE. easy to swallow stuff. couldn't that make a heck of difference in a few years? or not?
one sticking point, though, that I am trying to understand, is the missing "smart grid" Gore babbled on about it before Congress last spring, and it sounded important
but months of reading blogs go by without my getting any firmer idea of how that grid stuff is getting solved, or not solved, and who the interested parties are in the fight
not that I am critical, mind you
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sunflower Posted 11:51 am
08 Jan 2008
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:03 pm
08 Jan 2008
A large accomplishment yes, but not as bad (or big) as it seems. The sites would no doubt be spread out over the areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and other states. All of which are already larger than Pennsylvania individually, even more so combined.
It's like when we say that wind farms in Texas cover an area close to the size of Rhode Island. It sounds big (and it is), but it's not as gigantic as the mental image one would commonly apply to the land area of a state (especially when the operations are spread out in multiple locations).
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LPS Posted 12:25 pm
08 Jan 2008
No matter, it's all talk anyway. As soon as they start, whenever that is, I'll start adding up the square...footage.
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:44 pm
08 Jan 2008
It's doesn't change the fact that the amount of land is what it is, but by spreadin' it out, the illusion is given that it's not as much.
Likewise, by spreadin' it out, and environmental degredation (in general) becomes less apparent, and the environmental degredation itself is actually diluted somewhat.
It's like my environmental problems professor at college always said: (in general) one of the solutions to pollution is dilution.
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rgmerk Posted 2:36 pm
08 Jan 2008
Given that, 46,000 square miles for a large whack of America's energy use doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:18 pm
08 Jan 2008
Relying only on solar is very difficult. And there's no need for it, wind, wave, ocean and river current, and biogas, ultimately backed up with natural gas, just in case can shoulder a huge demand.
And sure, put "massive amounts of solar PV" in the southwest. But put it mainly on roofs. And solar furnace facilities in already existing industrial sites. No need to take over 1000s of square miles of wilderness.
Solar PV is economical almost everywhere mounted on roofs because it's already distributed. Cuts down on huge power line upgrades.
The southwest wastes huge amounts of electric power on conventional air conditioning now. By switching to geo heat exchange cooling most of that load would dissappear, freeing up a lot of solar for other uses, like charging plugin hybrids.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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ce1907 Posted 3:37 pm
08 Jan 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 5:35 pm
08 Jan 2008
His latest glossy circular features Dukakis-like posing with a gun on the border fence. He wants to "secure our borders". A GOP catch phrase, from a democratic congressman. He email polled about a border fence and national ID.
Even Feingold can't seem to focus on these sorts of new technology energy issues.
I seem to be on a roll touting this stuff via blogland and later on seeing it done. but mainly in Europe.
I mentioned the concept of a Prairie National Park to Feingold. That would host huge wind machines as well as bison herds, natural prairies, and act as a huge natural carbon sink.
We'll see, maybe Hillary will follow Teddy Roosevelt's tradition and start that park up?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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ce1907 Posted 10:07 pm
08 Jan 2008
but if he wasn't from an organization, no one would listen
even if turned the water cooler water into wine for everyone to share
so you need to latch onto a lobby
Anyway, what are the hurdles to the geothermal stuff in the Southwest? Start up costs? Are the products available? Where are the manufacturers? Lobbying, but lost in the shuffle?
Small real things that we can get done NOW are worth our attention
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Solar John Posted 11:50 pm
08 Jan 2008
Nanosolar is building $1 per watt solar panels, but they're shipping all of their first year's production to Germany! What's wrong with this picture?
John
Solar John
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trock Posted 11:56 pm
08 Jan 2008
These guys say that they only need a 92 by 92 mile square area to supply all the electricity in the U.S.. That's a little more than 8100 square miles. Who is closer to a correct estimate to how much land is needed, these guys, the SciAm guys or are they using different efficiencies or is the electricity requirements in 2050 that much higher?
But Ausra says they can do all the electricity with their setup, the SciAm guys still use other renewable energy.
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Nucbuddy Posted 11:56 pm
08 Jan 2008
Reference, please.
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Nucbuddy Posted 12:17 am
09 Jan 2008
Since a mile is ~1600 meters, that would be 22 billion square meters. At 10 watts per meter, that would be only 220 gigawatts. Perhaps Ausra has rosier expectations than 10 watts per meter.
Meanwhile, a single nuclear powerplant could supply all of the electricity in the U.S. in less than a single square mile. One difference between the solar plant and the nuke would be that the nuke would not be restricted to the Mohave Desert.
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trock Posted 12:22 am
09 Jan 2008
Wind power is greater in the winter than summer. Summer wind is 70 percent of winter.
Solar power is greater in the summer than in the winter. Winter sunshine is about 70 percent of summer.
Hook the 2 together with those HVDC (high voltage direct current) power lines.
Any thing that has to be made up is done with fossil fuel power plants that are already here, but have not been decommissioned/torn down.
Maybe some of those plants don't run in the summer because they are close to the summer solar power plants. Maybe some of those plants don't run in the winter because they are close to the wind power turbines. But they could cover for the intermittency of solar and wind.
There are areas in Denmark and Germany who use more than 40 percent of their electricity from wind. From what I have read, they are less concerned about the intermittency than we are in the United States even though we aren't at 1 pecent yet. Why? Because we are told by the fossil fuel guys, hey, can't use wind, can't use solar, what about the intermittency. If wind gets up to 40 percent of the electricity we use and solar gets up to 40 of the electricity we use, the other percents of electricity we need can be made up from the fossil fuel plants that are still there. If they are run less at full power, they can last a long time. That can be your electricity `battery.'
I didn't on purpose mean to leave out nuclear, and the others, they are and can be important.
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sunflower Posted 12:55 am
09 Jan 2008
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4243793.htm ...
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Nucbuddy Posted 1:30 am
09 Jan 2008
What would JTEC (Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion) have specifically to do with solar power?
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sunflower Posted 1:41 am
09 Jan 2008
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Solar John Posted 3:07 am
09 Jan 2008
Reference, please.
Here you go:
http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/2007/12/18/nanosolar-ships ...
John
Solar John
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:11 am
09 Jan 2008
What would JTEC (Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion) have specifically to do with solar power?
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:15 am
09 Jan 2008
What does that link have to do with your claim that Nanosolar is building $1 per watt solar panels?
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Matt G Posted 3:22 am
09 Jan 2008
"the world's lowest-cost solar panel - which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;"
This has translated into news sources claiming they're selling at $1/W, but considering they have all product sold for the next year I'm guessing they're selling for more than that. This being said, if they really can be profitable at $1/W then solar prices are set to start dropping.
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Matt G Posted 3:24 am
09 Jan 2008
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Nucbuddy Posted 3:29 am
09 Jan 2008
What does that link have to do with Solar John's claim that Nanosolar is building $1 per watt solar panels?
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Matt G Posted 3:41 am
09 Jan 2008
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Matt G Posted 3:46 am
09 Jan 2008
http://www.siliconsolar.com/Scrap-Solar-Cells-1oz-p-107.h ...
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Nucbuddy Posted 10:56 am
09 Jan 2008
Maybe you missed this FAQ from your link:
We recommend only using the scrap solar cells for creating 1-5 watt solar panels. Scrap solar cells are non-uniform cells and it may be difficult for you to create a functional solar panel larger the 5 watts.
By the way, are you volunteering to solder and mounts these broken cells, for anyone worldwide who asks, for free?
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Ken Zweibel Posted 1:35 pm
13 Jan 2008
We looked at the available caverns for compressed air; the issue of land area (of course, domesticating energy requires some reverse-NIMBY, but this is the 21st century, folks...), CSP versus PV (we like them both and have some surprises in store in an upcoming article to appear in Energy Biz Magazine), and the general use of ALL other renewables (including geothermal (solar) heat pumps, which are GREAT - {but it's solar thermal, not geothermal - it's not Earth's core energy}) and wind and distributed PV - but guess what? They are each only about a tenth of solar, and that's something we need to understand so we don't try the either/or bit - we need ALL of it and max all of it out. We are meeting the needs for all energy in the 21st century, including a tripling of demand - with stable prices.
And we do burn natural gas at first with the compressed air - but we shift to biogas and solar hydrogen from water splitting as they come on line, just as we expect a shift from corn ethanol to cellulosic to whatever works, including hydrogen, as the fuel extender in 80%-electric, 20%-fuel hybrids during the course of the century.
This is one of the best site's I've seen for knowledgeable dialogue. Thanks for featuring our article,
Ken
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amazingdrx Posted 4:30 pm
13 Jan 2008
But why in the world use wilderness land , even desert, for solar when you could use roofs for solar PV and already existing industrial sites for solar furnace energy systems? It doesn't seem consistent with the stated goals of going renewable with energy policy.
Solar PV on roofs can be way more than 10% of power needs. Check the San Diego county study that says 53% of their electric power could come from roof mounted solar PV. That is at lower PV efficiency sround 12%. NREL has certified 3 times that efficieny for PV using 10 sun concentration.
And what about cogenerating heat for heating hot water from solar PV? Even more efficiency.
Thanks Ken, keep coming back please! Great to read about your plan, even though mine is somewhat different.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:26 pm
13 Jan 2008
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2047917
Thought people might want to have a laugh
:P
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amazingdrx Posted 6:07 pm
13 Jan 2008
Rooftop solar PV at 2 bucks per watt. It could never compete with nuke u ler. Too expensive and impractical.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 12:55 am
14 Jan 2008
This makes nuclear advocate's case nearly impossible to defend.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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davea0511 Posted 11:21 am
28 Feb 2008
These are important factors that are too often ignored. Personally I don't think solar should be evaluated on the $/Watt installed, but instead it should be evaluated the $/Watt produced (sans installation) over a 10, 20, and 30 year period.
With those considerations I think Ausra might be at the head of the pack if they can produce electricity at $0.06/kWh like they say, not to mention their darn low installation costs for large farms. Plus, they offer the integrated steam storage without a need for compressors (which add at least $0.02/kWh to existing Solar PV costs).
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frflyer Posted 3:42 pm
22 Mar 2008
"The solar thermal industry is in its infancy but utilities like PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) have signed several contracts for solar power plants and negotiations for gigawatts more of solar electricity are ongoing."
Green Wombat http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/
Green Wombat has a bunch of articles of solar thermal plants approved and proposed for California.
"Solar thermal power plants such as Ausra's generate electricity by driving steam turbines with sunshine. Ausra's solar concentrators boil water with focused sunlight, and produce electricity at prices directly competitive with gas- and coal-fired electric power."
"Solar is one the most land-efficient sources of clean power we have, using a fraction of the area needed by hydro or wind projects of comparable output. All of America's needs for electric power - the entire US grid, night and day - can be generated with Ausra's current technology using a square parcel of land 92 miles on a side. For comparison, this is less than 1% of America's deserts, less land than currently in use in the U.S. for coal mines."
http://www.ausra.com
Other solar thermal companies:
http://www.infiniacorp.com/main.php
http://www.skyfuel.com/
http://www.solucar.es/sites/solar/en/index.jsp
http://www.esolar.com/
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/
http://www.us.schott.com/solar/english/index.html
German company that builds solar trough receiver tubes. They are building a manufacturing plant in New Mexico.
Ausra is building a factory in Nevada.
Infinea uses stirling engines with a solar reflector dish in units of 3-4 megawatts each. They can be installed locally, near the end user as individual units, not limited to large solar farms. Stirling Energy Systems( they have a new name I believe) also uses stirling engines.
I like the fact that solar thermal is low tech. There are no exotic materials or high tech parts to manufacture, other than the generators themselves.
Solar - no fuel ever. No fuel to extract, transport, store, burn or dispose of waste.
100% safe and clean
"A report from Argonne National Lab concluded that aircraft crashes could subject nuclear plants to numerous multiple failures that could lead to "total meltdown" even without direct damage to the containment structure."
Are these possible terrorist targets? God forbid.
http://www.cleanwisconsin.org/campaigns/NuclearPower/unsu ...
I agree with others that a mix of green technologies in the grid will work. But that doesn't rule out making a large part of it something like this solar proposal. The $400 billion in public money is tiny compared with subsidies to fossil fuels. Not to mention all the other hidden costs of oil.
http://www.setamericafree.org/saf_hiddencostofoil010507.p ...
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ten_most_distortionary_ene ...
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/10-9-95/oilsubsidy.html
http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm
"I'd put my money on the sun & solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that." Thomas Edison, 1931
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