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Thorium reactors are a promising technology but since they aren't ready for commercial deployment yet an accurate analysis of cost can't be made. The outline for an Australia using only renewables was done with existing technologies in mind but even then true cost can't be known without actually trying it.
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Sep 4, 2012 08:41
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Lawman 0 posted:So is this thread gonna be our D&D energy Thunderdome? I really can't see how space based solar makes any sense given the astronomical (  ) cost of launching anything into space. Consider how many tons of mirrors a solar thermal plant rated at 200MW needs, and even if you magically quadrupled that figure by putting it in space you'd probably still be better off putting it on the ground. Same goes for PV.
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Sep 4, 2012 15:23
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There's also the matter of how much energy it takes to launch things into space. How long would a space based solar array have to work just to pay off the energy debt of launching it?
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Sep 4, 2012 15:51
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Even if I concede the point that the EROEI is not as bad as my intuition told me, that link goes on to describe how it would be much more expensive and not save that much land area compared to ground based solar. it's outside the scope of this thread but I also don't actually believe that space exploration can save us from ourselves. The only long term solution I know of is to lower our population to a more sustainable level, which apparently affluent and well educated societies do by themselves. Populations always expand until limited by resources, so getting more resources in space won't help so much as subverting this trend through cultural means.
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Sep 4, 2012 16:47
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^^^^ I'm not sure exactly how to parse your post here, but if you wanted 6000 square miles of PVs surely it would be more cost effective and easy from an engineering standpoint to just cover buildings with them?
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Sep 5, 2012 02:59
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Aureon posted:Hydro as a backup is a terrible idea, unless you mean basin pumping. 95% uptime and being cheap are both amazing reasons to use hydro as a backup, especially combined with it's ability to wind up and down extremely quickly. If we run it full time it isn't actually 'free of charge' because it would mean we need to build additional storage to ween ourselves off non renewable energy sources.
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Sep 7, 2012 12:54
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Aureon posted:it's also known as basin pumping. It doesn't need to have massive storage, just enough to run for a couple of days. Plans for national (or even international) renewable energy grids call for large scales such that the whole thing will not go down at once. Australia is great for this since it is always sunny/windy somewhere, and because of this your backup at most would only have to reach some proportion of the minimum energy requirements for those few occasions where it is both cloudy and still over large parts of the country. 40% efficiency for storage is also exceptionally good, especially for a system that won't lose energy over time unlike thermal or chemical systems. Edit: this article mentions that pumped hydro has an efficiency of 70-75% Turks fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 08:41
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