The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

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bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Here's a bit of news that was brought to my attention this week which I think is relevant to this thread.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49393980/ns/us_news-environment/t/solar-energy-zones-created-federal-land-southwest/#.UIjWfFGAGx4

quote:

SAN FRANCISCO — Federal officials on Friday approved a plan that sets aside 285,000 acres of public land for the development of large-scale solar power plants, cementing a new government approach to renewable energy development in the West after years of delays and false starts.

...

The department no longer will decide projects on case-by-case basis as it had since 2005, when solar developers began filing applications. Instead, the department will direct development to land it has identified as having fewer wildlife and natural-resource obstacles.

The government is establishing 17 new "solar energy zones" on 285,000 acres in six states: California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Most of the land — 153,627 acres — is in Southern California.

...

The new solar energy zones were chosen because they are near existing power lines, allowing for quick delivery to energy-hungry cities. Also, the chosen sites have fewer of the environmental concerns — such as endangered desert tortoise habitat — that have plagued other projects.

Environmental groups like the Nature Conservancy who had been critical of the federal government's previous approach to solar development in the desert applauded the new plan.

Hopefully this speeds up the development time of solar thermal plants in the US and removes some of the uncertainty from the process. It's good to see that the plan has support from environmental groups as well.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2012 21:57

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 21:58

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

evil_bunnY posted:

With the illum they get it was about time they rub 2 brain cells together and use the petrodollars to buy solar.

I wonder how much of a hit they take due to the heat. It is notoriously hot on the Arabian Peninsula, and PV cells become less efficient as they get hotter. The effect is noticeable on residential solar, my dad says his highest production days are nearly always in the late spring/early fall, not the middle of the summer.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 19:19

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

Maybe an elevated array where the solar panels are on top and you have big heat sinks below catching the wind.

Without active cooling (a major parasitic loss), the equilibrium temperature is still going to be pretty hot. The average daily high in July in Riyadh is 110 F.

The bottom line is probably just that they get so much sun even a 30% efficiency hit is still acceptable.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 19:33

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Trabisnikof posted:

But once the grid is adapted to a more variable and high renewable mix, it seems very unlikely that new fusion plants will be renewables with storage on a cost basis.

Maybe there�s a scenario where we�re building TWs of demand in atmospheric carbon capture and then fusion starts to look more appealing.

And this is all assuming they resolve commercialization issues like neutron embrittlement etc.

This really depends on the state of large scale energy storage at that point.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 20:21

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

That price parity could happen because of increases to fossil fuel costs (maybe more accurately, FF costs including the externalized environmental costs) as much as decreases in storage costs.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2018 20:39

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Zero VGS posted:

Funny you mention that, I built a custom EV that uses two J1772 chargers, one on each side, and if I plug them both in (with two adjacent cords at a charging station) then I'll actually charge twice as fast (charge controller supports parallel), 13.2kw total.

where is your AI thread on this???

Edit: that TED talk was real interesting. I�d call that material a selective surface, which is what the inverse is called in solar thermal applications where they design for high emissivity/absorptivity in the visible spectrum but low emissivity/absorptivity in the infra red.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jul 3, 2018

# ¿ Jul 3, 2018 01:14

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Zero VGS posted:

I still don't get why it has to be sky-facing exactly... do the infrared light rays have to be pointed as space for the heat to "flow" away? If you aim them 100 feet down the street into some bushes, it won't work the same?

Its an energy balance based on radiation exchange between two �surfaces� (space isn�t a surface but it can be treated as one for the purposes of the math/thermo here) so the temperature of each surface matters. You want the surface to be facing the coldest object available, in this case space is colder than whatever is down the street.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2018 02:46

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

evil_bunnY posted:

It doesn't, but whatever catches the reflected gets heated up. So if that's a distant asteroid, that's very much not-your-problem, but a nearby building might be.

No, it does need to face space (or the coldest thing possible). Whatever it's facing is also going to be radiating back at it. If the panel is facing a nearby building, then the building is going to radiate heat to the panel based on it's ambient temperature, somewhere around 300 K. If the panel is facing space, then space is radiating heat to the panel based on an ambient temperature ~3 K. Thermal radiation is a function of T^4, that's Temperature to the fourth power. The difference in radiative energy received by the panel facing a 300K building vs 3K space is about 7 orders of magnitude.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jul 5, 2018

# ¿ Jul 5, 2018 18:34

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Infinite Karma posted:

I know that space is very cold. But I also know that the atmosphere is not. It seems like you should be calculating the thermal radiative exchange based primarily on the atmosphere's temperature and attenuation, not on the lower temperature of space that's behind it.

Because the atmosphere is largely transparent to the wavelengths of radiation being considered here. It participates to a small degree, as Phanatic touched on.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jul 5, 2018

# ¿ Jul 5, 2018 21:30

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

As the CA politics thread states in it's title, gently caress DiFi.

Is she really capable of holding this up? Is Brown going to hold off on signing it till after the election just as a favor to her?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2018 22:23

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Taffer posted:

I do. If they don't use nukes they'll either get tons of hydro (also terrible for tons of reasons) or fail and change the law before the deadline. Storage of renewables is looking promising but I don't see it covering the power needs of California before that deadline.

They can�t get significant additional capacity from hydro. We�ve already damed every major river in the state.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2018 17:36

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Orvin posted:

It�s all going to depend on how bad the fines are for violating parts of all that. At some point there will be shortage situations. Either load is higher than expected, or equipment failures during peak days will occur. Unless the fines are particularly nasty, the California utilities will buy �green� energy on paper from their neighbors. The reality will be that the neighbor will start some sort of peaking unit to replace the sold energy. That will be hard to track, and the alternative of rolling blackouts is going to be a really hard sell.

Or the state could start heavily investing in energy storage systems now, before renewable penetration reaches 60%...

# ¿ Sep 11, 2018 18:36

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

fishmech posted:

I disagree about that though, cuz half the point is that you need to show it being safe enough to drive on, which just a 10 meter chunk won't. And a few of the different installs like along the bike path in the Netherlands showed that the design has serous issues even when you just have people and bikes on top it without any heavy trucks or the extra debris to handle from automobile traffic.

For example, shattering with those low loads:
https://twitter.com/percytwits/status/548754743557128192

Probably wouldn't have found that nasty surprise with just a short length.

if only the field of engineering had developed some method of predicting potential loads and load limits *before* building something, perhaps by applying principles of physics and materials science?? or perhaps, some way to simulate such loads on a smaller, laboratory scale where the cost would be a fraction of a real world installation??

Alas, no such methods exist so we must waste large sums of money to verify these things

# ¿ Sep 24, 2018 18:25

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

fishmech posted:

You must be absolutely furious that car companies have to also test their car's safety in real labs with the cars as built, instead of just having the car company say they ran a simulation and it was perfectly fine.

yes, as an engineer i am personally furious about this

# ¿ Sep 24, 2018 18:55

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

the beer drinking duck gets it

# ¿ Sep 24, 2018 22:46

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Blue Star posted:

Lol technology isn't going to save us. Solar energy is a load of bullshit. It can't replace fossil fuels. Other renewables are even worse. Energy storage technology improves at a snails pace. Nuclear is unsafe and nobody wants it anyway. There's nothing coming down the pipeline to help us. Learn how to hunt, how to fish, how to farm. Make sure your kids learn these things. It's what they're gonna need. Don't even bother with sending them to college.

Storage is an engineering problem, not a research problem. We have solutions now that would work, they're just not mature enough to be cost competitive in the current environment. They need support to get there faster, like most things of this nature.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Oct 1, 2018

# ¿ Oct 1, 2018 18:35

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Nebakenezzer posted:

I mean, if America has literally lost its ability to construct nuclear power plants, seems like a good time to work on new designs

This gave me major Foundation vibes, the dying empire can�t see its dying

# ¿ Oct 3, 2018 06:58

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

That�s a neat tool, thanks for posting. Doesn�t take a very high carbon tax to make PV and wind the price winner in 90% of the country

# ¿ Oct 16, 2018 20:04

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

VideoGameVet posted:

I don't this accounts for storage:

Carbon emissions and costs associated with subsidizing New York nuclear instead of replacing it with renewables

Highlights

� A comparison of costs and CO2 emissions of New York's nuclear power and with renewable scenarios until 2050 is provided.

� Shutting nuclear down today and replacing it with onshore wind will save $7.9 billion until 2050.

� Renewable scenarios lead to CO2 savings up to 27.4 Mt until 2050.

� Reinvesting cost savings from renewable scenarios into additional wind capacities will increase CO2 savings up to 32.5 Mt.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652618326829

what if.... we built all that wind power and shut down coal plants instead of nuclear plants??

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 21:44

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Trabisnikof posted:

Yeah the danger to carbon capture plans comes entirely around deploying it to allow the continued use of carbon emitting technologies. I completely understand why its hard to separate the two when we all know some of the most powerful industries in the world will be pushing hard to market "carbon neutral" gasoline.

Guess which industry wants us to pay big bucks to put carbon in the same geologic formations they emptied to pollute the carbon in the first place?

Nationalize them, then we can leverage their assets to do it ourselves.

Carbon capture and sequestration in the "reverse oil well" sense as discussed on this page seems to me like it is inevitable eventually, assuming we can get to zero emissions first. Like in our wildest dreams where we somehow wrest control of the world away from billionaires, completely de-carbonize our electrical grid and manage to get emissions down to zero by 2050, we'd still be inhabiting a planet with dangerously elevated CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. At that point we will still want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2019 02:15

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

This molten salt thermal storage company just got a $26M first round and their concept looks interesting. It started at Stanford and then got into Google's incubator.

Paper on the tech here, with numbers: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054

Looks like the two turbines shown in this cartoon are in reality the same single turbine:

They use a brayton cycle turbine to drive a temperature difference between molten salt and some kind of antifreeze (n-hexane in the paper) cold reservoir, then run it the other way to generate power. Their cold reservoir is 180K and their hot is 823K.

For the temperatures they're targeting, they end up with a maximum theoretical roundtrip efficiency of 75% (that's electric->thermal->electric) which is very impressive IMO.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 00:10

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

They claim to be using cheap materials, no need for expensive high grade steel, etc. My understanding has been that the limitation on molten salt is the top end storage temperature (~600C), which limits your potential thermodynamic efficiency when converting back to electricity.

But this system gets around that with the lower cold reservoir and by using the same turbine to drive both the E->T and T->E.

edit: the paper I linked has a pretty complete overview of the technical limitations and advantages vs other systems. There is some discussion about maybe not being able to use the same turbine for both ends of the process. The salt in question (NaNO3/KNO3 eutectic) is apparently no problem for steel.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jan 10, 2019

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 00:28

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

That�s good info, I wonder how much it could be mitigated by higher (more expensive) grades of steel? Of course, that�s part of their value pitch, a lack of expensive materials.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 07:35

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

VideoGameVet posted:

So a fine steel bike weighs in at 18lbs. A carbon-fiber bike can be 14lbs (if you spend a few $1k). A 'common' steel bike (something that sold for $200 in 1975) may weigh in at 24lbs.

Does it matter? Maybe if you're a 150lbs Cat-1 racer. Less if you're a 62 year old 235lbs bike commuter :-)

Oh, and steel is recyclable. And IMHO feels better.

ok but what about aluminum? Surely that�s the relevant comparison no?

# ¿ May 11, 2019 01:12

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Phanatic posted:

So, fun times in California, huh?

https://twitter.com/akoseff/status/1295440093335830528?s=20

I believe the correct response is "Well, duh."

you mean we need more storage & capacity? who could have guessed??

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 01:11

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Yeah popular reporting on energy storage is abysmal in that regard. Frequently mixing/confusing units, or just reporting power not energy.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2020 19:27

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

won't someone think of the rich kids who had planned lucrative careers in the oil industry???

https://twitter.com/triofrancos/status/1345777914386788355

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 18:58

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

When I was in school for engineering (15ish years ago) it was common knowledge that you went into the petroleum industry to get paid, it was always listed as the best paying engineering discipline. We also all knew by then it was soulless destructive work hence the good compensation. These people were 100% signing up to do evil poo poo cause they expected to get paid well for it. gently caress em

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 07:08

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Another demand side curtailment I wish we�d see is desalination. Southern California could have tons of off shore wind and coastal desalination plants in an alternate reality where we live in a functioning society capable of long term planning and large infrastructure projects.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2021 19:10

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Infinite Karma posted:

First you have to overbuild your generation so your continuous generation (counting intermittency) is enough for the highest instantaneous demand. That's a lot of wasted capacity for all the rest of the time.

Didn't I read in this thread recently about how solar PV is so cheap now that companies are overbuilding capacity far in excess of what they'd ever previously considered?

Storage is the easy "on paper" solution but there's a reason that pumped hydro only exists in a handful of places: it is also prohibitively expensive if you aren't building it somewhere the natural topography makes it easy.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 17, 2021

# ¿ Jan 17, 2021 21:03

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

So there are people with the capably of remotely hacking an oil pipeline and shutting it down, but the only ones who do so are just looking to make a quick buck, not trying to disrupt fossil fuel infrastructure to force action on climate change?

# ¿ May 10, 2021 14:43

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

CommieGIR posted:

https://theconversation.com/switching-to-electric-vehicles-could-save-the-us-billions-but-timing-is-everything-106227

Would be interesting to see how the �ideal EV charging� case changes if they took into account the time dependent nature of solar generation, which already has major impacts on the grid in CA. (That �total capacity� red line isn�t flat) What proportion of ev�s could potentially do most of their charging during the middle of the day while people are at work and solar production is peaking?

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jun 4, 2021

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 06:41

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Kinetic energy is a terrible way to store large amounts of energy for all the obvious reasons

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 16:58

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

pumped hydro is the simplest, most cost effective method of energy storage we have

but only in places that are topologically conducive to it, like traditional hydro power

lifting a big weight in the air is a drop in the bucket compared to pumping water up a hill between two large reservoirs (think Lake Mead, not a tank of water)

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 17:29

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Infinite Karma posted:

Batteries have an absolutely garbage lifetime. They last maybe 10 years, and then have to be completely replaced. The concrete tower might be a dumb idea, I don't know, but the engineering equivalent of pumped hydro is at least going to last longer than batteries.

This seems a bit hyperbolic on battery lifetime no? They don't work for a decade and then just cease working. They get slightly worse every time you use them. 10 year old batteries aren't worthless, they just have reduced capacity (~80-90% of original capacity). Eventually they'd degrade enough to be worth more as recycled scrap than as batteries.

Aethernet posted:

For longer duration and intraseasonal storage, hydrogen - either produced through steam reformation with carbon capture initially before electrolysis starts to play a bigger role in the 2030s - can play a major role. I would expect to see hydrogen combined cycle turbines taking over the midmerit role from gas CCS in the 2040s.

Intraseasonal storage is a solution in search of a problem. Seasonal (and hourly!) production of solar and wind are generally inverse. Long term it makes a whole lot more sense to simply build out solar + wind with a large grid to compliment one another, rather than grid-scale months-long storage.

If doing so produces seasonal excess capacity, the excess would be better used to produce carbon-capture-derived liquid fuels for difficult-to-electrify transportation modes such as aircraft.

bawfuls fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jun 7, 2021

# ¿ Jun 7, 2021 19:12

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

mobby_6kl posted:

What's true for the UK isn't necessarily true for developing countries, which is most of them unfortunately .

In addition to this, 30 years isn't fast enough for imperial core countries like the UK.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 19:34

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Look massive corporations would never spend a small fraction of their revenue on ultimately useless technology just to serve as PR cover for their primary operations!

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 23:13

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

We are stopped from doing any of that by the interests of Capital, to which essentially all existing governments are subservient.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2021 02:10

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

VideoGameVet posted:

I've heard of some off-grid setups using NiFe batteries for 'ethical' reasons, hence my question. It's a really OLD tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9qlNCEZWKs

Leno also has one and he goes into a lot more detail on it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhnjMdzGusc&t=197s

# ¿ Jun 9, 2021 20:15

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 21:58

bawfuls: Oct 28, 2009

Aethernet posted:

Yes, I'm relaxed about continued extraction from existing wells, but I'm hoping the G7 will restrict investment in new plays, ideally to zero.

you are living in a fantasy world

# ¿ Jun 9, 2021 21:09

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