Bi-monthly open thread on climate solutions. Please try to be civil. Remember, climate science questions can be discussed on the Unforced Variations thread.
Reader Interactions
544 Responses to "Forced responses: Oct 2019"
Al Bundysays
E-P,
You talk about solid granite?? Only a solidly granite brain could claim that. Seriously, have you considered the ramifications of size and structure with regard to flywheel construction? The friggin point is exceeding granite by a few orders of magnitude.
An engine has to deal not only with large fuel molecules but also the oil’s VOC outgassing. A furnace only deals with CH4.
And that is precisely why I would use solid PTFE bearings or other permanent lubrication rather than oiled journals. They can wear out, but they are not going to either leak or vaporize. A modern condensing furnace has not one but two motors, each with a pair of bearings. The VOC emissions from them are negligible.
You first. You asked me if I mis-wrote “premixed”. I explained that it was not a typo, and why. Now you’re getting in a huff over it, presumably because YOUR engine (which I was not talking about) does not have that particular issue. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
1. The USA is never going to have a Nationalized Socialist Electricity Sector, locating nuclear plants where it chooses. (Well, maybe after we establish a rational national health-care structure, we’ll get to that, right?)
Of course not. But the USA’s water systems are largely municipally-owned, and there are a number of publicly-owned utilities including the one serving California’s capital: Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).
2. Nuclear plants will not be built as long as FF plants are a way, way, better investment.
Are we not agreed that FF plants have to be shut down? How can anything other than e.g. Allam-cycle plants still be going if the climate isn’t going to go crazy?
3. The only way to get nuclear plants actually built is what I have suggested. Set up a real market situation, where the different options for supply and demand can compete.
That depends very much on how the markets are designed. If you set things up so that you can ONLY buy and sell in hourly slots, then ONLY generators which can follow hourly variations can compete. If steady MONTHLY sales are part of the market system, an entirely different set of generators will be in competition there—and they won’t be “renewables”. If you also allow sales of heat, “renewables” won’t have anything to bid.
The “markets” as currently set up are rigged in favor of unreliable “renewables” and fast-ramping natural gas. As we here should be agreed, natural gas cannot be part of our energy systems going forward. Therefore, these markets as designed are defective and have to go also.
Other types of markets are quite feasible. One is a subscription model: you reserve X kW of average electric consumption, Y kW of peak electric consumption, and Z thousand BTU/hr of peak heat demand. If your desire for whatever exceeds your reserved amount, you either pay for the overage at spot rates or do without. There could be a market in both heat and electricity, and someone with e.g. a backup furnace could cut back on hot water delivery to sell it to someone who doesn’t have one. My figures from my model suggest that we’d always have an excess of heat and likely electricity also, so neither storage nor a spot market would be strictly necessary, but it’s still feasible.
Simple logic:
-If you set up a market system,
-And everything EP says about how good his approach is, and how bad all the others are is correct,
-Then nuclear would triumph… so EP should be all in on my approach.
The fact that he isn’t… that it is the one thing for which he has no answer… is all we need to know.
So set up markets which only allow emissions-free energy, not just for electric power but for all other needs too: space heat, DHW, transport energy, industrial process heat. Let ALL the nuclear technologies compete: light water, fast-breeder, molten salt and pebble bed and fusion when/if we get them. Let people use tricks like seasonal geothermal heat storage; buy cheap in summer, sell dear in winter. There’s another market, BTW.
CO2 capture needs to be a huge thing starting in the very near future. If it takes 2.5 GJ (694.4 kWh) to capture 1 ton and we price CO2 at $100/ton, each kWh(e) is worth 14.4¢ (about 4.7¢/kWh(t) at 32.9% efficiency). Perhaps that should be the standard price for electricity.
Maybe put a tax on energy to finance carbon capture. ½¢/kWh over 3.3 TW(th) is $16.5 million/hour, just under $145 billion/year. At $100/ton that pays for 1.45 billion tpy, roughly 1/4 of current US emissions. Not a hell of a lot, but as the oceans are still a net sink it would start atmospheric levels going down so long as our energy was fully decarbonized. ½¢/kWh(t) is about 14.6¢/therm, a fraction of the delivered price of natural gas even in the USA. We could easily afford to pay that.
E-P: We learned in the PAST that…
There is NOTHING to be learned by looking towards the future. EVERYTHING was solved in the past.
AB: “It’s Year Zero! Nothing we thought we knew applies any more!”
Reality: “Water is still wet, fire still burns, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hasn’t been repealed—as you ought to know.
“Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve created a massive climate-change problem for yourselves. Three decades after establishing the IPCC you are still dilly-dallying about implementing even completely inadequate measures to stop it. You have precisely ONE proven, scalable solution to it. Are you going to continue to posture and march and pray for salvation, or use what you’ve got? Remember, every day you wait makes the damage worse.
“It’s okay if you trash your planet. It’s seen millions of failed species. You can put yourselves on the list. People have asked if humans are smarter than yeast. So far, it appears that you aren’t.”
nigeljsays
Al Bundy, I can’t see anything fundamentally wrong with your storage idea. Needs a cost analysis.
Al Bundysays
E-P: It would burn a very rich mixture of methane, propane or dimethyl ether (which would probably require fuel injection).
AB: Only a moron or an evil piece of s*** would consider running an engine rich. Do you hate the environment so much that you’d spew raw fuel on purpose?
Al Bundysays
E-P: The net emissions from the furnace would be lower than currently, because the flame temperature would be lower.
AB: Yada. Yep, furnaces spew NOX because they use flames. To replace them with a system that still uses flames is stupid. Like I said, engines NEED to operate below 2600F. Your proposal does not achieve that bare minimum metric. You seem to think that marginal improvement is good enough. It isn’t. Think like an inventor, NOT an engineer.
Now, that 2600F limit can be evaded if post-combustion cleanup of NOX is used. Your stated goal of avoiding post-combustion cleanup while exceeding said limit AND spewing raw fuel on purpose speaks loudly. As if UHCs don’t matter. Even if one ignores the deaths they cause, UHCs are potent GHGs.
And to “quote” someone with your own stupid words is putrid. Stop attributing your idiocy to me.
Al Bundysays
E-P,
Note that there are TWO proposals on the table. The 60% efficient no-emissions engine and the one-day-storage solution. Note that there are plenty more in queue. The solution to flooding, the solution to wildfires, the solution to aquifer depletion…
I exist whether you choose to ignore reality or not. “I wasn’t talking about your engine” is evidence that your mother was a ostrich. Intelligent people always include everything when they ponder possibilities.
zebrasays
#454 Engineer-Poet,
I’d like you to answer two questions, without the long, incoherent, and irrelevant other stuff.
1. “If you set things up so that you can only buy in hourly slots.”
What exactly does that mean? If I can buy in hourly slots, what would prevent me from contracting with my supplier for multiple ‘hourly slots’?
2. If “people can do tricks like seasonal geothermal storage, buy cheap in summer sell dear in winter”, wouldn’t that solve the problem of long-term storage with wind and solar that you keep complaining about?
Again, please, refrain from completely irrelevant and incorrect ranting about electric circuits and so on.
–New utility-scale (onshore) wind and solar and solar capacity is now cheaper, by the LCOE metric, than new conventional energy–even gas CC. (See Figure 1, report.) In fact, it is often comparable to the marginal operating costs of existing conventional generation. (Figure 3, report.)
–The rapid cost declines for wind and solar continue. Over the last 10 years, *unsubsidized* wind costs have declined by 70%, while the figure for unsubsidized solar sits at 89%. (Figure 2, report.) However, there are signs of slowing, particularly for onshore wind, which has clocked a 5-year rate of decline of 7%, as compared with solar PV’s 13%. Such is not unexpected for maturing technologies.
–Storage costs continue to decline, but are still somewhat expensive:
Lithium-ion, particularly for shorter duration applications, remains the least expensive of energy storage technologies analyzed and continues to decrease in cost, thanks to improving efficiencies and a maturing supply chain.
Solar PV + storage systems are economically attractive for short-duration wholesale and commercial use cases, though they remain challenged for residential and longer-duration wholesale use cases.
nigeljsays
Comments 452 – 461 dont display. Seems to be taking a long time to fix this problem.
And in a display of a truly amazing patellar tendon reflex that nevertheless doesn’t even manage to kick the box let alone get outside of it, AB wrote @457:
Only a moron or an evil piece of s*** would consider running an engine rich. Do you hate the environment so much that you’d spew raw fuel on purpose?
Two things wrong there:
1. Nothing is being “spewed”. It’s being consumed downstream. The rich combustion guarantees that no NOx is produced to be a problem later.
2. There’s no “raw fuel” dumped out. The partial combustion is to reform fuel to CO and H2, which improves the combustion characteristics and extends the lean flammability limit of the subsequent combustion step in the furnace. You can use that to run a cooler flame with lower NOx emissions.
1. “If you set things up so that you can only buy in hourly slots.”
What exactly does that mean?
It means that nobody, neither providers nor consumers, can strike a deal for X amount of power across the next 720 or 8760 hourly slots and guarantee a price over the next month or year. They are stuck buying piecemeal even if they need bulk lots.
This also prevents anyone else from buying in bulk lots. Refrigerators are something everyone has, and their average load is probably pretty steady. Why should you have to pay on-peak prices for refrigerator power during the day when you could negotiate a much better price for 24/7 power, as that is how you use it? The people who declared how the market is set up won’t let you.
If I can buy in hourly slots, what would prevent me from contracting with my supplier for multiple ‘hourly slots’?
Because the way the auctions are settled is that all buyers pay, and all sellers receive, the highest bid accepted to meet the bid-for demand. This is set up so that “renewables” are able to bid into the system at $0.00 and still get paid, especially given the “must-take” status they have under US law. Every generator which does not have must-take status or has non-zero marginal cost gets screwed.
2. If “people can do tricks like seasonal geothermal storage, buy cheap in summer sell dear in winter”, wouldn’t that solve the problem of long-term storage with wind and solar that you keep complaining about?
Only in the specific case of low-temperature heat, such as for space heating. You can’t store higher-temperature heat in the earth because it’ll boil the groundwater and get spewed out as geysers. This makes geologic storage useless for banking electric power on a seasonal basis; the efficiency of low-temperature heat engines is abysmal.
Geological heat storage is limited to serving winter heating demand, which is mostly in the north. The peak rate of heating fuel consumption in the USA is something around 2.5 quads/month in February. If you are producing 4+ quads of emission-free waste heat per month, you are always making more heat than you need. Surpluses 12 months of the year eliminate the case for storage. They do make the case for heated sidewalks and roadways, though; why bother to shovel and plow snow when you can melt it? That also eliminates freeze-thaw damage.
refrain from completely irrelevant and incorrect ranting about electric circuits and so on.
Oh faw kew. Your inability to understand the relevance does not make it go away.
David B. Bensonsays
Engineer-Poet @254 — The ERCOT Texas energy market allows all generators to bid for time slots, as long as they wish, whenever they wish, in the day-ahead market.
The so-called real time market is more constrained.
–New utility-scale (onshore) wind and solar and solar capacity is now cheaper, by the LCOE metric, than new conventional energy
Stop RIGHT there. Dispatchable and non-dispatchable generation are two RADICALLY different and incommensurable things. Only dispatchables can be properly rated by LCOE. The best (though perhaps not good enough) rating we have for non-dispatchables is LACE, Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy. If one wind kWH costs you $0.04 to generate, but only saves $0.01 in the system, you’ve made a loss of $0.03 for each kWh.
But even that misses the point. What we should be counting is Levelized Avoided Cost of Emissions (this is allegedly Real Climate; can anyone seriously argue against this?) Ergo, we should not even talk about “accomplishments” such as “50% solar on the German grid” (at noon on a Sunday, the day with the least demand). That’s utterly irrelevant, effectively lying by omission. We should ONLY be talking about greenhouse gases emitted, and how we can get that number down as fast as we can. If the fluid-bed lignite burners are still cranked up to track the drop in PV when the sun goes down or a front moves in, all that “renewable” energy is doing far less good than the faulty metric suggests. It might even be doing no good at all.
It might even be doing no good at all.
Accordingly, we need to completely change our metrics, our language and our incentives. We should neither talk “renewable MWh generated” nor compensate anyone for them. We should MEASURE the decrease in system-wide GHG emissions and pay compensation for THAT, and THAT alone. And if the “renewables” turn out to be much less effective than the naive view holds… isn’t that something we should not only want to know, but want EVERYONE to know?
When “The Unchained Goddess” was made in 1958, we had the luxury of 30 years to make mistakes. When the IPCC was established in 1989, we really needed to be on the ball right then. We are STILL not on the ball, not merely failing at GHG control but STILL misleading the public and ourselves by talking about the WRONG THINGS… and we are now 30 years behind.
nigelj @463: Note the scientific cluelessness in said article:
the thermal decomposition process itself results in emissions, as carbon trapped in the limestone combines with oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide as a byproduct.
The author didn’t even know that CaCO3 needs no oxygen whatsoever to break down to CO2 + CaO, just energy. This is the caliber of “science education” that today’s “journalists” have.
One thing that seems symptomatic of our over use of technology is the humble leaf blower. Said it before. Now its been implicated in the decline of insects as well. While I’m not anti technology, we do need to prioritise better if we are to build out enough low carbon energy.
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @469, yeah I did wonder about that. Cringeworthy. The trouble is it looks like the media have cut back on investigative articles and science writers in the race to the bottom being caused by the internet.
But at least the potential is there to create low carbon cement. You could have acknowledged that.
Al Bundysays
Nigel,
E-P talked about a 0.5% drop in AC frequency being a problem for the grid. (hard?)
You spoke of a 5% drop in battery voltage being a problem for a phone. (easy?)
Methinks you lost an order of magnitude!
I hate it when that happens. Heck, I probably lost one or two with regard to ultra-massive flywheels. Lets see…
According to the online flywheel calculator a 3000 inch ring flywheel will store about 220KWH/lb at 10,000RPM. That’s over two tons per MWH. About 3 hours of storage are needed so a 300MW facility needs 1,000MWH of storage. So two thousand tons.
Sounds heavy but not outrageously so. YO! E-P These numbers sane or insane? Some serious forces at play. I’d hate to be anywhere nearby when something like that broke.
Wikipedia says:
According to their last study, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, found that the wholesale energy market prices over the past six months during the 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. period (the “neck” of the duck) have increased to $60 per megawatt-hour, compared to about $35 per megawatt-hour in the same time frame in 2016.[3] However, on the other side they have measured a drastic decrease in the midday prices, nearing $15 per megawatt-hour.
That’s quite a spread. Spin things up for next to nothing when solar peaks and then drain it at top dollar in the evening.
Probably just a fun speculation, but that’s what we’re here for.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @465 “This is set up so that “renewables” are able to bid into the system at $0.00 and still get paid, especially given the “must-take” status they have under US law. ”
Well wouldn’t your time and efforts (and other nuclear power advocates) be best served lobbying to get the government to put nuclear power and renewables on equal must take status? I mean perhaps you are already. It certainly seems like the right solution as we need all the zero carbon energy we can get and let the best system win in an open market or let a combination of systems develop.
It’s just that the nuclear energy problem seems like its largely a political problem and a process problem more than a technical or cost problem. We will probably never get government to prioritise nuclar power but you can get them to put it on an equal footing with renewabales. This is what some of us here haven been quietly and subtly suggesting, although I find your technical explanations interesting enough.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @468 “What we should be counting is Levelized Avoided Cost of Emissions (this is allegedly Real Climate; can anyone seriously argue against this?)”
Makes sense. Also what about a measure for wind power (for example) that includes storage costs and provision of full services such as sufficient reactive power ( itself coming from a zero carbon source like hydro power)? So no fossil fuels backup. This would all enable an apples to apples cost comparison with nuclear power.
But at least the potential is there to create low carbon cement. You could have acknowledged that.
I didn’t notice anything about HOW this was supposed to be done. You know, solutions?
Masons have long worked with lime cement, made by mixing calcined lime (CaO) with water, presumably making Ca(OH)2. This gradually absorbs CO2 over time and becomes CaCO3. I don’t know and personally doubt that it becomes strong enough fast enough to make useful concrete, but if you captured the CO2 during the calcination process you could have carbon-negative cement.
I can easily think of ways to do this for Portland cement. First, use biochar to supply the energy instead of coal breeze. Second, feed the combustion in the retort with oxygen and recycled CO2 rather than air. The effluent gas should be almost entirely CO2 and oxygen; compress to 10 bar and cool, and the CO2 liquefies and leaves you with the oxygen which you can recycle. Voila, you have a carbon-negative cement plant; bio-carbon comes in but doesn’t go back to the air. The slow carbonation of the cement after it sets is another carbon sink, albeit a small one.
One problem with standard concrete structures is that the reinforcing steel corrodes, both weakening the structure and causing concrete to spall off in chunks. Basalt fiber takes less energy to make than steel and does not corrode. There you go: better reinforced concrete.
E-P talked about a 0.5% drop in AC frequency being a problem for the grid. (hard?)
You spoke of a 5% drop in battery voltage being a problem for a phone. (easy?)
Methinks you lost an order of magnitude!
Your phone’s battery is a single Li-ion cell with a voltage of perhaps 2.85 at max discharge and 4.3 V when full. On the other hand, the chips you’re feeding are mostly operating at 1.8 volts or less.
You could use a linear regulator (effectively, a resistor) to reduce the voltage, but you’d be throwing a lot of energy away as heat and drastically reducing your useful battery life. Instead, your phone has a DC-DC converter in it which converts the higher battery voltage to the low voltage needed by the chips, and uses the extra energy of the electrons to boost the current. If you take your phone apart and look at the wiring coming from the battery very closely, you’ll see a chip with a surface-mounted inductor connected to it as one of the first things on the route. That’s the converter chip.
What’s affordable to put on a circuit board to handle 4.3 volts and a handful of milliwatts gets costly when you need it to handle megawatts at thousands of volts. Also, when phase relationships of a fraction of a degree determine how much power flows and huge machines rely on near-constant speeds, frequency is not something you can fool with.
According to the online flywheel calculator a 3000 inch ring flywheel will store about 220KWH/lb at 10,000RPM.
Since you don’t say whether that’s radius, diameter or circumference I’ll have to reverse-engineer your numbers. 220 kWh = 792 MJ. 1 lb = 1/2.205 kg. E = ½mv² so v = 59,099 m/sec. Almost SIXTY THOUSAND KILOMETERS per second. Orbital speed around Earth is only about 8 km/s; solar escape velocity from Earth is only 40-odd km/s.
If ω = 20,000 π/min = 333.3 π/sec, r = 56.43 meters = 2221 inches. No idea where you’re getting 3000 from. Maybe diameter of a disc of constant thickness (IOW, not a ring)?
That’s over two tons per MWH. About 3 hours of storage are needed so a 300MW facility needs 1,000MWH of storage. So two thousand tons.
Sounds heavy but not outrageously so. YO! E-P These numbers sane or insane?
Totally batshit crazy by almost 4 orders of magnitude; Li-ion batteries are struggling to hit 400 Wh/kg and you think you can get 220,000 Wh/lb with kinetics?! Much cleverer people than you (like Keith Löfstrom) have worked on ways to manage stuff moving at a mere 12 km/sec. He was trying to get stuff into space for low multiples of the cost of electric power, but the Lofstrom loop would make a good energy-storage device too. He wasn’t contemplating anything close to your insane speeds, and there is no material strong enough to make a stand-alone flywheel capable of going that fast.
You’d honestly be better off going with superconducting magnet energy storage; that at least stays put except for the electrons, and can use the strength of the earth to resist the magnetic pressure trying to rip it apart. I am not clear on why it has not been attempted at scale yet.
wouldn’t your time and efforts (and other nuclear power advocates) be best served lobbying to get the government to put nuclear power and renewables on equal must take status?
“Must-take” status is a Federal thing, but replacing “renewable” with “clean” in state portfolio standards has been successful in a few states. Not mine, sadly. Citizens Climate Lobby is actively hostile to this, at least my local chapter. We are poised to lose more clean energy from JUST ONE PLANT than our state’s entire wind capacity produces, and they are FOR IT!
It’s like the reaction of Europe to France: “You decarbonized, but YER DOIN’ IT WRONG!” It’s severely tempting to bash those people in the face, it really is. I don’t think anything less would shock them sufficiently to reconsider their dogmas, if it’s possible for anything to.
I mean perhaps you are already.
I’ve been shot down every time I’ve brought the issue up with Citizens Climate Lobby, and there are no other local organizations for the issue.
It certainly seems like the right solution as we need all the zero carbon energy we can get and let the best system win in an open market or let a combination of systems develop.
Well… “combination of systems”. What’s gonna do what for whom? I’m currently working on a concept to leverage municipal solid waste as a source of both energy and materials, but the USA resource base is only about 1.4 quads/year out of 100+ quads total. I have a scheme to use it for a type of storage but again, there just isn’t that much of it to work with.
It’s just that the nuclear energy problem seems like its largely a political problem
Nuclear energy has been a political problem for well over 50 years now. “No nukes!” was satirized by Berke Breathed in “Bloom County” long after it became a political force.
The sad thing is, nuclear energy was the SOLUTION before it was a problem. Did you know that the Sierra Club’s original motto was “Atoms Not Dams”? Had we continued on that course, climate change would literally be a dead issue by now; we would have dealt with it and moved on.
It’s so sad to think of things that easily could have been, but are not because people are stupid.
what about a measure for wind power (for example) that includes storage costs and provision of full services such as sufficient reactive power ( itself coming from a zero carbon source like hydro power)?
You don’t need terribly much to make reactive power. Capacitors, either physical or synchronous (over-excited synchronous motors, either working or spinning with no load) do the job. You just have to make sure reactive power exists where it’s needed.
Regulation and frequency control are much harder. They involve real energy and lots of it. Dumping excess energy is trivial; there are a host of ways to get rid of surpluses, many of them productive. But filling in deficits is HARD. Maybe you’re willing to dump electric power to heaters in big tanks of molten solar salt, then use that hot salt to make steam for electric power later. Your responsiveness to surpluses will be good, but much worse for deficits and your storage efficiency will be under 50%. Oh, and it’ll cost you massive amounts to extend your storage beyond a few hours or low double digits. The material is cheap but not THAT cheap, and it has losses.
As I said, I’ve got a scheme to use municipal solid waste as an energy resource to deal with some of these issues. As it is vastly easier to handle surpluses productively than deficits, my plans are biased toward surpluses. A fast-breeder based energy economy for the USA would have year-round heat surpluses, so no need to store heat to keep cities warm and reliably defrosted.
So no fossil fuels backup.
That is (a) necessary (b) hard to do (c) breaks the brains of too many people fixated on “renewables” because of dealing with (b).
This would all enable an apples to apples cost comparison with nuclear power.
Yes, we need that. We need it, starting with the all-too-measurable health impacts of fossil-fired power, but the literally too-low-to-measure impacts of nuclear.
If the health impacts of nuclear are literally too small to measure, we need one FUCK of a lot more of it! Public safety DEMANDS it, because our fossil-based system is DOIN’ IT WRONG!
zebrasays
signing in to read the comments
zebrasays
#465 Engineer-Poet,
#1. I’ve pointed this out before. Why don’t you answer?
-You complain that there is bias in the system, and repeat the same list of injustices we’ve all heard before many times.
-I have suggested… for quite a while now, as anyone here can attest, and directly to you… eliminating bias by having a common carrier system where anyone can contract with anyone to buy and sell electricity.
-Your response is, once again, to ….complain that there is bias in the system, and repeat the same list of injustices we’ve all heard before many times.
That’s not what stable geniuses do. Or even regular (sober) engineers. Why don’t you try again?
#2. I have suggested, again, many times, that wind and solar can be used… and are used… as a source for storing both heat and cold for low-temp space conditioning applications, in the short term. The same is true for heat from natural gas or coal plants… Con Edison in NYC has been doing it since forever, and even converting it to cold for AC applications.
If you have a model for longer-term storage, that’s great. It would mean that wind and solar could displace energy currently used for space conditioning.
Now, as to (your) relevance. Reciting long lists we’ve all heard before is not “explaining” or justifying your position. It’s what panicky students do when they are in over their heads. It’s what people who memorize religious texts do to justify oppression. It is certainly not what either competent engineers, or poets, do.
Killiansays
Some Economics edumacation for some of you. Important observations from Steve Keen.
“U.S. Electric Bus Demand Outpaces Production as Cities Add to Their Fleets. Cities are still working through early challenges, but they see health and climate benefits ahead. In Chicago, two buses save the city $24,000 a year in fuel costs.”
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @475, well the concrete people are certainly not releasing any details of the process, understandably perhaps, but I have no reason to doubt they are onto something.
Basalt fibre is rather interesting. I’m not an engineer, but have had some involvement with buildings. I found an article below where a company claims they have made it cost competitive with steel reinforcing:
Engineer poet, could you have a look at my comment 421 on page 9 on electronic devices and voltages etc, and give some feedback? If you have time. I’m no engineer, and was going by what other people have said.
12 hours of energy storage enough for U.S. to run on 80% solar+wind.
Scientists in California have modeled a solar-heavy/wind power electricity grid, without nationwide HVDC, that could reliably deliver 80% of U.S. electricity needs. 100% of needs would require 3 weeks of energy storage.
MARCH 1, 2018 JOHN WEAVER
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Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of Technology; and the Carnegie Institution for Science have released an analysis of the U.S. electricity grid managing expanding volumes of intermittent generation in the research journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States posits that the U.S. electrical grid could be 80% powered by a solar-heavy+wind power combination using just 12 hours of energy storage to smooth out the variability.
The paper also shows that a wind-heavy+solar power electricity grid would require a nationwide high voltage DC (HVDC) network to move electricity from wind energy dense mid-western regions toward the coasts. The solar heavy network wouldn’t need energy storage with an HVDC network.
To reach a 100% wind+solar U.S. electricity grid would require 3 weeks of energy storage. According to lead author Dr. Matthew R. Shaner.
Our team took a simplified approach aimed at understanding fundamental geophysical constraints on wind and solar power. We looked at solar and wind power availability on an hourly basis across the U.S. and determined how much of current electricity demand could be met by varying amounts of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage, in addition to changes in the electricity grid.
The U.S. currently uses about 3,900 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year. A 12 hour chunk of that would be about 5.4 TWh. At a cost of $350 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), that would cost $1.9 trillion. If each of the 110 million single family homes in the U.S. were to install an energy storage system, and split the total volume needed with the electricity utilities, we’d need approximately 24kWh/home.
About equal to a couple of Powerwalls, a little larger than a Sonnen or 1/2 of a Model 3.
Supplemental information was included with the abstract at the journal website. In it were visualizations of various models, some examples below. The models were mixtures of solar, wind, over sizing these two resources and energy storage. One model, with 100% solar plus 50% over capacity paired with 12 hours of energy storage got us to 93% reliability.
50% wind, 50% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours storage – 99.6%25% wind, 75% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours, 98.7%100% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours storage – 93%
‘Reliability’ is being defined as amounts of periods – one hour each – that the electricity sources meet the projected demand.
In 2012, NREL released a report suggesting the U.S. could meet 80% of its electricity needs with wind and solar, ‘with varying degrees of dispatchability, together with a mix of flexible conventional generation and grid storage, additions of transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations.’
In April of 2017, the Climate Policy Initiative released another groundbreaking report Flexibility, The path to low-carbon, low-cost electricity grids. In it the group showed that the maximum cost of this, ‘near-total renewable energy-based system is cost competitive today compared with a gas-based system with a $50/tonne carbon price – by 2030 it will be cost-competitive even without a carbon price.’
The team analyzed 36 years of hourly U.S. weather data (1980 to 2015) to understand the fundamental geophysical barriers to supplying electricity with only solar and wind power.
The key takeaway from this report should be that intermittent electricity sources, like wind and solar power, will not mean a loss of the regular electricity delivery that modern humanity has come to expect. While any one of these models probably won’t be exactly what we do, its clear that we have many options to remove CO2 from our electricity grid – as long as we power forward aggressively.
Killiansays
Watch the entire Keen interview. He gets down to zero-carbon. Makes the error, naturally, of going technocopian bc… he’s an economist… but the economics he discusses is dead-on.
Re: Energy vs profit/income, this is the point I made to him that you cannot have profit in a regenerative system because it bleeds energy from the system. He says this occurred to him in 2016, but I’ve been on him about this since 2010.
Since Steve doesn’t know regenerative systems, he still can’t see the reality of the only choice we have. He does, however, get the massive drop in consumption. However, as an economist with some sanity, he should understand no economy can shrink like we need and still function – at least not a Capitalist system. Ergo, we absolutely cannot avoid creating a different type of economy… as I have long said.
Whether he calls for that is not clear from this video, but he does strongly criticize Capitalism and implies it can’t function in a massively reduced consumption scenario.
“New report finds costs of climate change impacts often underestimated…”
It also seems to me one of the other problems in these sorts of economic models is they assume quite high rates of gdp growth will continue forever, something that looks hard to justify given the speed we are using up the most easily extracted resources, and the downward trends in economic growth in developed countries since the 1970’s, despite considerable attempts to boost growth, so gambling that future generations will adapt to climate change on the basis of high rates of economic growth rates is a HUGE gamble.
Killiansays
Please, nigel, just shut up. Literally always wrong in your responses to me and only rarely germane and never do you advance the conversation in any way, let alone actually bring something to it not already there
To wit:
Re #367 nigelj said Killian says “Al Bundy, your machine is not going to save the world. Can’t.”
A perfect example of a straw man.
Not only not perfect, in no way a Straw Man argument. This would have been: “Al Bundy, your machine is not going to save the world as you have claimed it will. Can’t.”
What you called a Straw Man is analysis and opinion. It could be incorrect, but is not now and never will be a Straw Man fallacy. Ironically, your claim of a Straw Man was a Straw Man: I didn’t say what you claimed I said (via implication of the Straw Man claim.)
Please, stop posting. What’s it been? 3 years? 4 years of pointless posts by you? Enough already. You rose to your level of incompetence with your very first post, in all seriousness. You take up so much bandwidth here while adding no insight or analysis that is of any value and not found in other posts.
Note the infant mortality pre-modern medicine… it had NOTHING to do with being H-G’s.
Everything else you said was incorrect, too.
No time now to school you, but trust me, it’s coming.
nigeljsays
Killian @490 &491, you are still going on about the strawman machine issue, and you are boring people to tears.
I never said that infant mortality with hunter gatherers was simply because they were hunter gatherers, so you have just posted another strawman, but are too dim to see it. Claiming without listing proof that what I said is incorrect is an empty assertion, and saying you will provide proof over time, well santa claus is coming as well.
Your worries about the world running out of mineral resources don’t make sense, because you tell us how wonderful third world farmers and hunter gatherers are. Your views are incoherent.
nigeljsays
Killian @490 &491, so you rubbish the contribution I make in your fact free rant. And what contribution do you make to this website Killian? Looks like heaps of personal abuse, hypocrisy, crazy simplificiation ideas that are not at all thought through, and staggering quantities of pettiness, and copying and pasting other peoples ideas. And that is being kind to you.
-Your response is, once again, to ….complain that there is bias in the system, and repeat the same list of injustices we’ve all heard before many times.
But you don’t offer any solutions to that bias. You don’t even acknowledge the necessity: fossil fuels have to go! Even biomethane has to go if there’s any significant leakage; its 1-year GWP is roughly 120. We can literally not allow this going forward if we hope to save the planet from devastating climate change and another mass extinction… possibly including humans.
Per Bill McKibben, we need to get down to 350 again, and fast. I have a way to do this. If you don’t, why are you quibbling? about ANYTHING? Put up or shut up.
That’s not what stable geniuses do. Or even regular (sober) engineers. Why don’t you try again?
FFS, I have given you a sketch of a fossil-fuel-free system with sufficient surplus energy to SOLVE the GHG problem by extraction and geological sequestration. What more could you ask for?! Yes, current policy PROHIBITS that solution. THE POLICY IS THE PROBLEM.
Reciting long lists we’ve all heard before is not “explaining” or justifying your position.
You have refuted NOTHING on that list. Neither have you stipulated to the list. Now, unless you have valid, fact-backed objections to things on the list, stipulate to it and admit to the consequences thereof. Only then we can move forward.
Engineer poet, could you have a look at my comment 421 on page 9 on electronic devices and voltages etc, and give some feedback?
It helps if you hyper-link your specific reference. On Real Climate, the comment permalink is in the timestamp; right-click it and select “Copy link location”.
I thought I had given you feedback already, but I prepared more for you. Different battery chemistries have very different voltage-vs-state-of-charge curves. NiCd and NiMH are notably “flat”.  Lead-acid is somewhat less flat. A typical Li-ion chemistry goes from 2.50 V at max discharge to 4.20 volts at rated charge, which at 1.68:1 is radically different from the former. Electronic chips dependent upon constant voltages for normal operation require power conditioning between Li-ion batteries and their own power supply pins.
12 hours of energy storage enough for U.S. to run on 80% solar+wind.
Ignored questions:
* What are the GHG emissions of the remaining 20%?
* Assuming proportionality, are those cuts sufficient to start reducing atmospheric GHGs? (no)
* Is there enough surplus energy to get to net-zero? (don’t make me laugh)
* Even at net-zero, can we restore the atmosphere and climate soon enough to avoid catastrophe? (see above)
Positing 2.5 GJ(e)/ton to remove atmospheric CO2, it would take upwards of 2 TW(e) devoted to remediation to get atmospheric CO2 down to where we need it to be in this century without losing our arctic permafrost and firing the “clathrate gun”, let alone not melting Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Any plan that doesn’t hit net-zero itself plus that much surplus IS A FAILURE.
I’ve got that. What have YOU got?
To reach a 100% wind+solar U.S. electricity grid would require 3 weeks of energy storage. According to lead author Dr. Matthew R. Shaner.
Hopelessly optimistic.
Our team took a simplified approach aimed at understanding fundamental geophysical constraints on wind and solar power.
That was obvious. Forget these clowns, they have grossly underestimated those limitations and nothing they have to say is worth a plug nickle.
It also seems to me one of the other problems in these sorts of economic models is they assume quite high rates of gdp growth will continue forever
TBH, they appear to be assuming this because they expect (or demand) the third-world countries to increase their production and standard of living to approach the industrialized West.
Such production cannot be sustained without massive external support. Watch Empire of Dust for a glimpse of the reality. If outside support for coal-burning machinery was cut off, both standard of living and GHG emissions of the third world would slope downward rapidly.
Mr. Know It Allsays
485 – nigelj
“12 hours of energy storage enough for U.S. to run on 80% solar+wind.”
Critical thinking nigelj – it’s a thing. Their claim is laughable.
Let’s see the details of their plan listing:
1- size and location of new/existing RE generation sites,
2 – size and location of new transmission lines,
3 – methods, size, and location of storage,
4 – quantities for all of that, including labor and material costs
5 – a realistic schedule for detail design, permits, material procurement, construction, commissioning, and projected cost of maintenance for the next 50 years.
Dude, across 100% of the USA the sun is below the horizon longer than 12 hours per day Sept 21 to Mar 21. In much of the country it’s below the horizon quite a bit longer than 12 hours per day for at least a couple of months. They are wild-eyed dreamers. They know it is abject BS – and just want to push gullible people into pushing politicians to support this pipe dream.
Don’t believe me? DO IT IN SOME OTHER COUNTRIES FIRST! Leave the USA alone. Greenies like to crow about the wonderful Germans and Chinese – DO IT THERE. See how it works out.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @496 & Mr. Know It All @498
Questions, questions. Don’t ask me. Find the research study if you are interested:
“The sun sets, and the wind doesn’t always blow,” noted Steven Davis, UCI associate professor of Earth system science and co-author of a renewable energy study published today in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. “
I just came across the article, and thought it would be of interest, and I haven’t got around to finding the research paper.
KIA, the plan is not all solar power. It combines solar and wind power. Hearing you talk about critical thinking is hysterically funny:)
This is crazy, and said despite the fact I said @365 ” there is no question that hunter gatherer society work’s sustainably and is a relatively peaceful and sharing society” which is in the comment he is referencing. Unbelievable but true.
nigeljsays
Engineer-Poet @497, thanks for the link to the movie. I’m not inclined to watch it right through, but I read a summary of it, and the theme is interesting. I hear what you are saying. I found an interesting interview with the director below:
E-P,
You talk about solid granite?? Only a solidly granite brain could claim that. Seriously, have you considered the ramifications of size and structure with regard to flywheel construction? The friggin point is exceeding granite by a few orders of magnitude.
Grow a brain.
Al Bundy @439:
The net emissions from the furnace would be lower than currently, because the flame temperature would be lower. Southwest Research Institute has made this work in a vehicle.
@442:
And that is precisely why I would use solid PTFE bearings or other permanent lubrication rather than oiled journals. They can wear out, but they are not going to either leak or vaporize. A modern condensing furnace has not one but two motors, each with a pair of bearings. The VOC emissions from them are negligible.
@450:
You first. You asked me if I mis-wrote “premixed”. I explained that it was not a typo, and why. Now you’re getting in a huff over it, presumably because YOUR engine (which I was not talking about) does not have that particular issue. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
zebra writes @414:
Of course not. But the USA’s water systems are largely municipally-owned, and there are a number of publicly-owned utilities including the one serving California’s capital: Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).
Are we not agreed that FF plants have to be shut down? How can anything other than e.g. Allam-cycle plants still be going if the climate isn’t going to go crazy?
That depends very much on how the markets are designed. If you set things up so that you can ONLY buy and sell in hourly slots, then ONLY generators which can follow hourly variations can compete. If steady MONTHLY sales are part of the market system, an entirely different set of generators will be in competition there—and they won’t be “renewables”. If you also allow sales of heat, “renewables” won’t have anything to bid.
The “markets” as currently set up are rigged in favor of unreliable “renewables” and fast-ramping natural gas. As we here should be agreed, natural gas cannot be part of our energy systems going forward. Therefore, these markets as designed are defective and have to go also.
Other types of markets are quite feasible. One is a subscription model: you reserve X kW of average electric consumption, Y kW of peak electric consumption, and Z thousand BTU/hr of peak heat demand. If your desire for whatever exceeds your reserved amount, you either pay for the overage at spot rates or do without. There could be a market in both heat and electricity, and someone with e.g. a backup furnace could cut back on hot water delivery to sell it to someone who doesn’t have one. My figures from my model suggest that we’d always have an excess of heat and likely electricity also, so neither storage nor a spot market would be strictly necessary, but it’s still feasible.
So set up markets which only allow emissions-free energy, not just for electric power but for all other needs too: space heat, DHW, transport energy, industrial process heat. Let ALL the nuclear technologies compete: light water, fast-breeder, molten salt and pebble bed and fusion when/if we get them. Let people use tricks like seasonal geothermal heat storage; buy cheap in summer, sell dear in winter. There’s another market, BTW.
CO2 capture needs to be a huge thing starting in the very near future. If it takes 2.5 GJ (694.4 kWh) to capture 1 ton and we price CO2 at $100/ton, each kWh(e) is worth 14.4¢ (about 4.7¢/kWh(t) at 32.9% efficiency). Perhaps that should be the standard price for electricity.
Maybe put a tax on energy to finance carbon capture. ½¢/kWh over 3.3 TW(th) is $16.5 million/hour, just under $145 billion/year. At $100/ton that pays for 1.45 billion tpy, roughly 1/4 of current US emissions. Not a hell of a lot, but as the oceans are still a net sink it would start atmospheric levels going down so long as our energy was fully decarbonized. ½¢/kWh(t) is about 14.6¢/therm, a fraction of the delivered price of natural gas even in the USA. We could easily afford to pay that.
AB @451:
AB: “It’s Year Zero! Nothing we thought we knew applies any more!”
Reality: “Water is still wet, fire still burns, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hasn’t been repealed—as you ought to know.
“Now, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve created a massive climate-change problem for yourselves. Three decades after establishing the IPCC you are still dilly-dallying about implementing even completely inadequate measures to stop it. You have precisely ONE proven, scalable solution to it. Are you going to continue to posture and march and pray for salvation, or use what you’ve got? Remember, every day you wait makes the damage worse.
“It’s okay if you trash your planet. It’s seen millions of failed species. You can put yourselves on the list. People have asked if humans are smarter than yeast. So far, it appears that you aren’t.”
Al Bundy, I can’t see anything fundamentally wrong with your storage idea. Needs a cost analysis.
E-P: It would burn a very rich mixture of methane, propane or dimethyl ether (which would probably require fuel injection).
AB: Only a moron or an evil piece of s*** would consider running an engine rich. Do you hate the environment so much that you’d spew raw fuel on purpose?
E-P: The net emissions from the furnace would be lower than currently, because the flame temperature would be lower.
AB: Yada. Yep, furnaces spew NOX because they use flames. To replace them with a system that still uses flames is stupid. Like I said, engines NEED to operate below 2600F. Your proposal does not achieve that bare minimum metric. You seem to think that marginal improvement is good enough. It isn’t. Think like an inventor, NOT an engineer.
Now, that 2600F limit can be evaded if post-combustion cleanup of NOX is used. Your stated goal of avoiding post-combustion cleanup while exceeding said limit AND spewing raw fuel on purpose speaks loudly. As if UHCs don’t matter. Even if one ignores the deaths they cause, UHCs are potent GHGs.
And to “quote” someone with your own stupid words is putrid. Stop attributing your idiocy to me.
E-P,
Note that there are TWO proposals on the table. The 60% efficient no-emissions engine and the one-day-storage solution. Note that there are plenty more in queue. The solution to flooding, the solution to wildfires, the solution to aquifer depletion…
I exist whether you choose to ignore reality or not. “I wasn’t talking about your engine” is evidence that your mother was a ostrich. Intelligent people always include everything when they ponder possibilities.
#454 Engineer-Poet,
I’d like you to answer two questions, without the long, incoherent, and irrelevant other stuff.
1. “If you set things up so that you can only buy in hourly slots.”
What exactly does that mean? If I can buy in hourly slots, what would prevent me from contracting with my supplier for multiple ‘hourly slots’?
2. If “people can do tricks like seasonal geothermal storage, buy cheap in summer sell dear in winter”, wouldn’t that solve the problem of long-term storage with wind and solar that you keep complaining about?
Again, please, refrain from completely irrelevant and incorrect ranting about electric circuits and so on.
Here’s the most recent Lazard report on the levelized costs of RE and storage:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
Highlights:
–New utility-scale (onshore) wind and solar and solar capacity is now cheaper, by the LCOE metric, than new conventional energy–even gas CC. (See Figure 1, report.) In fact, it is often comparable to the marginal operating costs of existing conventional generation. (Figure 3, report.)
–The rapid cost declines for wind and solar continue. Over the last 10 years, *unsubsidized* wind costs have declined by 70%, while the figure for unsubsidized solar sits at 89%. (Figure 2, report.) However, there are signs of slowing, particularly for onshore wind, which has clocked a 5-year rate of decline of 7%, as compared with solar PV’s 13%. Such is not unexpected for maturing technologies.
–Storage costs continue to decline, but are still somewhat expensive:
Comments 452 – 461 dont display. Seems to be taking a long time to fix this problem.
https://qz.com/1748561/%E2%80%A8reducing-cements-carbon-footprint-is-critical-to-climate-fight/
Signs of some real progress happening: “Scientists are taking concrete steps towards reducing cement’s massive carbon footprint”
And in a display of a truly amazing patellar tendon reflex that nevertheless doesn’t even manage to kick the box let alone get outside of it, AB wrote @457:
Two things wrong there:
1. Nothing is being “spewed”. It’s being consumed downstream. The rich combustion guarantees that no NOx is produced to be a problem later.
2. There’s no “raw fuel” dumped out. The partial combustion is to reform fuel to CO and H2, which improves the combustion characteristics and extends the lean flammability limit of the subsequent combustion step in the furnace. You can use that to run a cooler flame with lower NOx emissions.
Go read this piece on Southwest Research Institute’s invention as it explains everything. You DO have to think outside the box to understand it, though. I know you have a lot of trouble with that.
News flash: I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.
You mean, except when you do it? Hypocrite. Go take a flying shpx at a rolling donut.
No, it’s proof positive that it was about a specific characteristic of diesels and you chose to take it out of context. I get the feeling that you are an outrage junkie.
zebra asks @460:
It means that nobody, neither providers nor consumers, can strike a deal for X amount of power across the next 720 or 8760 hourly slots and guarantee a price over the next month or year. They are stuck buying piecemeal even if they need bulk lots.
This also prevents anyone else from buying in bulk lots. Refrigerators are something everyone has, and their average load is probably pretty steady. Why should you have to pay on-peak prices for refrigerator power during the day when you could negotiate a much better price for 24/7 power, as that is how you use it? The people who declared how the market is set up won’t let you.
Because the way the auctions are settled is that all buyers pay, and all sellers receive, the highest bid accepted to meet the bid-for demand. This is set up so that “renewables” are able to bid into the system at $0.00 and still get paid, especially given the “must-take” status they have under US law. Every generator which does not have must-take status or has non-zero marginal cost gets screwed.
Only in the specific case of low-temperature heat, such as for space heating. You can’t store higher-temperature heat in the earth because it’ll boil the groundwater and get spewed out as geysers. This makes geologic storage useless for banking electric power on a seasonal basis; the efficiency of low-temperature heat engines is abysmal.
Geological heat storage is limited to serving winter heating demand, which is mostly in the north. The peak rate of heating fuel consumption in the USA is something around 2.5 quads/month in February. If you are producing 4+ quads of emission-free waste heat per month, you are always making more heat than you need. Surpluses 12 months of the year eliminate the case for storage. They do make the case for heated sidewalks and roadways, though; why bother to shovel and plow snow when you can melt it? That also eliminates freeze-thaw damage.
Oh faw kew. Your inability to understand the relevance does not make it go away.
Engineer-Poet @254 — The ERCOT Texas energy market allows all generators to bid for time slots, as long as they wish, whenever they wish, in the day-ahead market.
The so-called real time market is more constrained.
nigel, thanks for the update on low-carbon concrete. (@463) It’s an important facet of the overall decarbonization problem.
Kevin McKinney writes @461:
Stop RIGHT there. Dispatchable and non-dispatchable generation are two RADICALLY different and incommensurable things. Only dispatchables can be properly rated by LCOE. The best (though perhaps not good enough) rating we have for non-dispatchables is LACE, Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy. If one wind kWH costs you $0.04 to generate, but only saves $0.01 in the system, you’ve made a loss of $0.03 for each kWh.
But even that misses the point. What we should be counting is Levelized Avoided Cost of Emissions (this is allegedly Real Climate; can anyone seriously argue against this?) Ergo, we should not even talk about “accomplishments” such as “50% solar on the German grid” (at noon on a Sunday, the day with the least demand). That’s utterly irrelevant, effectively lying by omission. We should ONLY be talking about greenhouse gases emitted, and how we can get that number down as fast as we can. If the fluid-bed lignite burners are still cranked up to track the drop in PV when the sun goes down or a front moves in, all that “renewable” energy is doing far less good than the faulty metric suggests. It might even be doing no good at all.
It might even be doing no good at all.
Accordingly, we need to completely change our metrics, our language and our incentives. We should neither talk “renewable MWh generated” nor compensate anyone for them. We should MEASURE the decrease in system-wide GHG emissions and pay compensation for THAT, and THAT alone. And if the “renewables” turn out to be much less effective than the naive view holds… isn’t that something we should not only want to know, but want EVERYONE to know?
When “The Unchained Goddess” was made in 1958, we had the luxury of 30 years to make mistakes. When the IPCC was established in 1989, we really needed to be on the ball right then. We are STILL not on the ball, not merely failing at GHG control but STILL misleading the public and ourselves by talking about the WRONG THINGS… and we are now 30 years behind.
nigelj @463: Note the scientific cluelessness in said article:
The author didn’t even know that CaCO3 needs no oxygen whatsoever to break down to CO2 + CaO, just energy. This is the caliber of “science education” that today’s “journalists” have.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=12287210
One thing that seems symptomatic of our over use of technology is the humble leaf blower. Said it before. Now its been implicated in the decline of insects as well. While I’m not anti technology, we do need to prioritise better if we are to build out enough low carbon energy.
Engineer Poet @469, yeah I did wonder about that. Cringeworthy. The trouble is it looks like the media have cut back on investigative articles and science writers in the race to the bottom being caused by the internet.
But at least the potential is there to create low carbon cement. You could have acknowledged that.
Nigel,
E-P talked about a 0.5% drop in AC frequency being a problem for the grid. (hard?)
You spoke of a 5% drop in battery voltage being a problem for a phone. (easy?)
Methinks you lost an order of magnitude!
I hate it when that happens. Heck, I probably lost one or two with regard to ultra-massive flywheels. Lets see…
According to the online flywheel calculator a 3000 inch ring flywheel will store about 220KWH/lb at 10,000RPM. That’s over two tons per MWH. About 3 hours of storage are needed so a 300MW facility needs 1,000MWH of storage. So two thousand tons.
Sounds heavy but not outrageously so. YO! E-P These numbers sane or insane? Some serious forces at play. I’d hate to be anywhere nearby when something like that broke.
Wikipedia says:
According to their last study, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, found that the wholesale energy market prices over the past six months during the 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. period (the “neck” of the duck) have increased to $60 per megawatt-hour, compared to about $35 per megawatt-hour in the same time frame in 2016.[3] However, on the other side they have measured a drastic decrease in the midday prices, nearing $15 per megawatt-hour.
That’s quite a spread. Spin things up for next to nothing when solar peaks and then drain it at top dollar in the evening.
Probably just a fun speculation, but that’s what we’re here for.
Engineer-Poet @465 “This is set up so that “renewables” are able to bid into the system at $0.00 and still get paid, especially given the “must-take” status they have under US law. ”
Well wouldn’t your time and efforts (and other nuclear power advocates) be best served lobbying to get the government to put nuclear power and renewables on equal must take status? I mean perhaps you are already. It certainly seems like the right solution as we need all the zero carbon energy we can get and let the best system win in an open market or let a combination of systems develop.
It’s just that the nuclear energy problem seems like its largely a political problem and a process problem more than a technical or cost problem. We will probably never get government to prioritise nuclar power but you can get them to put it on an equal footing with renewabales. This is what some of us here haven been quietly and subtly suggesting, although I find your technical explanations interesting enough.
Engineer-Poet @468 “What we should be counting is Levelized Avoided Cost of Emissions (this is allegedly Real Climate; can anyone seriously argue against this?)”
Makes sense. Also what about a measure for wind power (for example) that includes storage costs and provision of full services such as sufficient reactive power ( itself coming from a zero carbon source like hydro power)? So no fossil fuels backup. This would all enable an apples to apples cost comparison with nuclear power.
nigelj wrote @471:
I didn’t notice anything about HOW this was supposed to be done. You know, solutions?
Masons have long worked with lime cement, made by mixing calcined lime (CaO) with water, presumably making Ca(OH)2. This gradually absorbs CO2 over time and becomes CaCO3. I don’t know and personally doubt that it becomes strong enough fast enough to make useful concrete, but if you captured the CO2 during the calcination process you could have carbon-negative cement.
I can easily think of ways to do this for Portland cement. First, use biochar to supply the energy instead of coal breeze. Second, feed the combustion in the retort with oxygen and recycled CO2 rather than air. The effluent gas should be almost entirely CO2 and oxygen; compress to 10 bar and cool, and the CO2 liquefies and leaves you with the oxygen which you can recycle. Voila, you have a carbon-negative cement plant; bio-carbon comes in but doesn’t go back to the air. The slow carbonation of the cement after it sets is another carbon sink, albeit a small one.
One problem with standard concrete structures is that the reinforcing steel corrodes, both weakening the structure and causing concrete to spall off in chunks. Basalt fiber takes less energy to make than steel and does not corrode. There you go: better reinforced concrete.
And let’s not forget carbon nanofiber reinforcement of the cement itself.
Al Bundy the physics flunkout writes @472:
Your phone’s battery is a single Li-ion cell with a voltage of perhaps 2.85 at max discharge and 4.3 V when full. On the other hand, the chips you’re feeding are mostly operating at 1.8 volts or less.
You could use a linear regulator (effectively, a resistor) to reduce the voltage, but you’d be throwing a lot of energy away as heat and drastically reducing your useful battery life. Instead, your phone has a DC-DC converter in it which converts the higher battery voltage to the low voltage needed by the chips, and uses the extra energy of the electrons to boost the current. If you take your phone apart and look at the wiring coming from the battery very closely, you’ll see a chip with a surface-mounted inductor connected to it as one of the first things on the route. That’s the converter chip.
What’s affordable to put on a circuit board to handle 4.3 volts and a handful of milliwatts gets costly when you need it to handle megawatts at thousands of volts. Also, when phase relationships of a fraction of a degree determine how much power flows and huge machines rely on near-constant speeds, frequency is not something you can fool with.
Since you don’t say whether that’s radius, diameter or circumference I’ll have to reverse-engineer your numbers. 220 kWh = 792 MJ. 1 lb = 1/2.205 kg. E = ½mv² so v = 59,099 m/sec. Almost SIXTY THOUSAND KILOMETERS per second. Orbital speed around Earth is only about 8 km/s; solar escape velocity from Earth is only 40-odd km/s.
If ω = 20,000 π/min = 333.3 π/sec, r = 56.43 meters = 2221 inches. No idea where you’re getting 3000 from. Maybe diameter of a disc of constant thickness (IOW, not a ring)?
Totally batshit crazy by almost 4 orders of magnitude; Li-ion batteries are struggling to hit 400 Wh/kg and you think you can get 220,000 Wh/lb with kinetics?! Much cleverer people than you (like Keith Löfstrom) have worked on ways to manage stuff moving at a mere 12 km/sec. He was trying to get stuff into space for low multiples of the cost of electric power, but the Lofstrom loop would make a good energy-storage device too. He wasn’t contemplating anything close to your insane speeds, and there is no material strong enough to make a stand-alone flywheel capable of going that fast.
You’d honestly be better off going with superconducting magnet energy storage; that at least stays put except for the electrons, and can use the strength of the earth to resist the magnetic pressure trying to rip it apart. I am not clear on why it has not been attempted at scale yet.
nigelj wrote @473:
“Must-take” status is a Federal thing, but replacing “renewable” with “clean” in state portfolio standards has been successful in a few states. Not mine, sadly. Citizens Climate Lobby is actively hostile to this, at least my local chapter. We are poised to lose more clean energy from JUST ONE PLANT than our state’s entire wind capacity produces, and they are FOR IT!
It’s like the reaction of Europe to France: “You decarbonized, but YER DOIN’ IT WRONG!” It’s severely tempting to bash those people in the face, it really is. I don’t think anything less would shock them sufficiently to reconsider their dogmas, if it’s possible for anything to.
I’ve been shot down every time I’ve brought the issue up with Citizens Climate Lobby, and there are no other local organizations for the issue.
Well… “combination of systems”. What’s gonna do what for whom? I’m currently working on a concept to leverage municipal solid waste as a source of both energy and materials, but the USA resource base is only about 1.4 quads/year out of 100+ quads total. I have a scheme to use it for a type of storage but again, there just isn’t that much of it to work with.
Nuclear energy has been a political problem for well over 50 years now. “No nukes!” was satirized by Berke Breathed in “Bloom County” long after it became a political force.
The sad thing is, nuclear energy was the SOLUTION before it was a problem. Did you know that the Sierra Club’s original motto was “Atoms Not Dams”? Had we continued on that course, climate change would literally be a dead issue by now; we would have dealt with it and moved on.
It’s so sad to think of things that easily could have been, but are not because people are stupid.
nigelj wrote @474:
You don’t need terribly much to make reactive power. Capacitors, either physical or synchronous (over-excited synchronous motors, either working or spinning with no load) do the job. You just have to make sure reactive power exists where it’s needed.
Regulation and frequency control are much harder. They involve real energy and lots of it. Dumping excess energy is trivial; there are a host of ways to get rid of surpluses, many of them productive. But filling in deficits is HARD. Maybe you’re willing to dump electric power to heaters in big tanks of molten solar salt, then use that hot salt to make steam for electric power later. Your responsiveness to surpluses will be good, but much worse for deficits and your storage efficiency will be under 50%. Oh, and it’ll cost you massive amounts to extend your storage beyond a few hours or low double digits. The material is cheap but not THAT cheap, and it has losses.
As I said, I’ve got a scheme to use municipal solid waste as an energy resource to deal with some of these issues. As it is vastly easier to handle surpluses productively than deficits, my plans are biased toward surpluses. A fast-breeder based energy economy for the USA would have year-round heat surpluses, so no need to store heat to keep cities warm and reliably defrosted.
That is (a) necessary (b) hard to do (c) breaks the brains of too many people fixated on “renewables” because of dealing with (b).
Yes, we need that. We need it, starting with the all-too-measurable health impacts of fossil-fired power, but the literally too-low-to-measure impacts of nuclear.
If the health impacts of nuclear are literally too small to measure, we need one FUCK of a lot more of it! Public safety DEMANDS it, because our fossil-based system is DOIN’ IT WRONG!
signing in to read the comments
#465 Engineer-Poet,
#1. I’ve pointed this out before. Why don’t you answer?
-You complain that there is bias in the system, and repeat the same list of injustices we’ve all heard before many times.
-I have suggested… for quite a while now, as anyone here can attest, and directly to you… eliminating bias by having a common carrier system where anyone can contract with anyone to buy and sell electricity.
-Your response is, once again, to ….complain that there is bias in the system, and repeat the same list of injustices we’ve all heard before many times.
That’s not what stable geniuses do. Or even regular (sober) engineers. Why don’t you try again?
#2. I have suggested, again, many times, that wind and solar can be used… and are used… as a source for storing both heat and cold for low-temp space conditioning applications, in the short term. The same is true for heat from natural gas or coal plants… Con Edison in NYC has been doing it since forever, and even converting it to cold for AC applications.
If you have a model for longer-term storage, that’s great. It would mean that wind and solar could displace energy currently used for space conditioning.
Now, as to (your) relevance. Reciting long lists we’ve all heard before is not “explaining” or justifying your position. It’s what panicky students do when they are in over their heads. It’s what people who memorize religious texts do to justify oppression. It is certainly not what either competent engineers, or poets, do.
Some Economics edumacation for some of you. Important observations from Steve Keen.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/economics-of-31834604
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14112019/electric-bus-cost-savings-health-fuel-charging
“U.S. Electric Bus Demand Outpaces Production as Cities Add to Their Fleets. Cities are still working through early challenges, but they see health and climate benefits ahead. In Chicago, two buses save the city $24,000 a year in fuel costs.”
Engineer-Poet @475, well the concrete people are certainly not releasing any details of the process, understandably perhaps, but I have no reason to doubt they are onto something.
Basalt fibre is rather interesting. I’m not an engineer, but have had some involvement with buildings. I found an article below where a company claims they have made it cost competitive with steel reinforcing:
https://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20161210/NEWS/161219992/neuvokas-raises-the-bar-on-manufacture-of-rebar
Engineer poet, could you have a look at my comment 421 on page 9 on electronic devices and voltages etc, and give some feedback? If you have time. I’m no engineer, and was going by what other people have said.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/
12 hours of energy storage enough for U.S. to run on 80% solar+wind.
Scientists in California have modeled a solar-heavy/wind power electricity grid, without nationwide HVDC, that could reliably deliver 80% of U.S. electricity needs. 100% of needs would require 3 weeks of energy storage.
MARCH 1, 2018 JOHN WEAVER
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Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; the California Institute of Technology; and the Carnegie Institution for Science have released an analysis of the U.S. electricity grid managing expanding volumes of intermittent generation in the research journal Energy & Environmental Science.
Geophysical constraints on the reliability of solar and wind power in the United States posits that the U.S. electrical grid could be 80% powered by a solar-heavy+wind power combination using just 12 hours of energy storage to smooth out the variability.
The paper also shows that a wind-heavy+solar power electricity grid would require a nationwide high voltage DC (HVDC) network to move electricity from wind energy dense mid-western regions toward the coasts. The solar heavy network wouldn’t need energy storage with an HVDC network.
To reach a 100% wind+solar U.S. electricity grid would require 3 weeks of energy storage. According to lead author Dr. Matthew R. Shaner.
Our team took a simplified approach aimed at understanding fundamental geophysical constraints on wind and solar power. We looked at solar and wind power availability on an hourly basis across the U.S. and determined how much of current electricity demand could be met by varying amounts of solar panels, wind turbines, and energy storage, in addition to changes in the electricity grid.
The U.S. currently uses about 3,900 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year. A 12 hour chunk of that would be about 5.4 TWh. At a cost of $350 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), that would cost $1.9 trillion. If each of the 110 million single family homes in the U.S. were to install an energy storage system, and split the total volume needed with the electricity utilities, we’d need approximately 24kWh/home.
About equal to a couple of Powerwalls, a little larger than a Sonnen or 1/2 of a Model 3.
Supplemental information was included with the abstract at the journal website. In it were visualizations of various models, some examples below. The models were mixtures of solar, wind, over sizing these two resources and energy storage. One model, with 100% solar plus 50% over capacity paired with 12 hours of energy storage got us to 93% reliability.
50% wind, 50% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours storage – 99.6%25% wind, 75% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours, 98.7%100% solar, 50% over capacity, 12 hours storage – 93%
‘Reliability’ is being defined as amounts of periods – one hour each – that the electricity sources meet the projected demand.
In 2012, NREL released a report suggesting the U.S. could meet 80% of its electricity needs with wind and solar, ‘with varying degrees of dispatchability, together with a mix of flexible conventional generation and grid storage, additions of transmission, more responsive loads, and changes in power system operations.’
In April of 2017, the Climate Policy Initiative released another groundbreaking report Flexibility, The path to low-carbon, low-cost electricity grids. In it the group showed that the maximum cost of this, ‘near-total renewable energy-based system is cost competitive today compared with a gas-based system with a $50/tonne carbon price – by 2030 it will be cost-competitive even without a carbon price.’
The team analyzed 36 years of hourly U.S. weather data (1980 to 2015) to understand the fundamental geophysical barriers to supplying electricity with only solar and wind power.
The key takeaway from this report should be that intermittent electricity sources, like wind and solar power, will not mean a loss of the regular electricity delivery that modern humanity has come to expect. While any one of these models probably won’t be exactly what we do, its clear that we have many options to remove CO2 from our electricity grid – as long as we power forward aggressively.
Watch the entire Keen interview. He gets down to zero-carbon. Makes the error, naturally, of going technocopian bc… he’s an economist… but the economics he discusses is dead-on.
Re: Energy vs profit/income, this is the point I made to him that you cannot have profit in a regenerative system because it bleeds energy from the system. He says this occurred to him in 2016, but I’ve been on him about this since 2010.
Since Steve doesn’t know regenerative systems, he still can’t see the reality of the only choice we have. He does, however, get the massive drop in consumption. However, as an economist with some sanity, he should understand no economy can shrink like we need and still function – at least not a Capitalist system. Ergo, we absolutely cannot avoid creating a different type of economy… as I have long said.
Whether he calls for that is not clear from this video, but he does strongly criticize Capitalism and implies it can’t function in a massively reduced consumption scenario.
https://www.rt.com/shows/renegade-inc/474059-economics-crises-recessions-planet/
signing in to read comments
Al Bundy @451, quite so. Seems the “ok boomer” thing has spread far and wide.
Regarding economists and their modelling of climate impacts:
etc.https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/11/new-report-finds-costs-of-climate-change-impacts-often-underestimated/
“New report finds costs of climate change impacts often underestimated…”
It also seems to me one of the other problems in these sorts of economic models is they assume quite high rates of gdp growth will continue forever, something that looks hard to justify given the speed we are using up the most easily extracted resources, and the downward trends in economic growth in developed countries since the 1970’s, despite considerable attempts to boost growth, so gambling that future generations will adapt to climate change on the basis of high rates of economic growth rates is a HUGE gamble.
Please, nigel, just shut up. Literally always wrong in your responses to me and only rarely germane and never do you advance the conversation in any way, let alone actually bring something to it not already there
To wit:
Re #367 nigelj said Killian says “Al Bundy, your machine is not going to save the world. Can’t.”
A perfect example of a straw man.
Not only not perfect, in no way a Straw Man argument. This would have been: “Al Bundy, your machine is not going to save the world as you have claimed it will. Can’t.”
What you called a Straw Man is analysis and opinion. It could be incorrect, but is not now and never will be a Straw Man fallacy. Ironically, your claim of a Straw Man was a Straw Man: I didn’t say what you claimed I said (via implication of the Straw Man claim.)
Please, stop posting. What’s it been? 3 years? 4 years of pointless posts by you? Enough already. You rose to your level of incompetence with your very first post, in all seriousness. You take up so much bandwidth here while adding no insight or analysis that is of any value and not found in other posts.
Re 365 nigelj
Your bigotry pisses me off. Read this.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/helga-ingeborg-vierich/life-expectancy-life-span-and-the-size-of-human-beings/10154297237415833/
Note the infant mortality pre-modern medicine… it had NOTHING to do with being H-G’s.
Everything else you said was incorrect, too.
No time now to school you, but trust me, it’s coming.
Killian @490 &491, you are still going on about the strawman machine issue, and you are boring people to tears.
I never said that infant mortality with hunter gatherers was simply because they were hunter gatherers, so you have just posted another strawman, but are too dim to see it. Claiming without listing proof that what I said is incorrect is an empty assertion, and saying you will provide proof over time, well santa claus is coming as well.
Your worries about the world running out of mineral resources don’t make sense, because you tell us how wonderful third world farmers and hunter gatherers are. Your views are incoherent.
Killian @490 &491, so you rubbish the contribution I make in your fact free rant. And what contribution do you make to this website Killian? Looks like heaps of personal abuse, hypocrisy, crazy simplificiation ideas that are not at all thought through, and staggering quantities of pettiness, and copying and pasting other peoples ideas. And that is being kind to you.
zebra whines #480:
But you don’t offer any solutions to that bias. You don’t even acknowledge the necessity: fossil fuels have to go! Even biomethane has to go if there’s any significant leakage; its 1-year GWP is roughly 120. We can literally not allow this going forward if we hope to save the planet from devastating climate change and another mass extinction… possibly including humans.
Per Bill McKibben, we need to get down to 350 again, and fast. I have a way to do this. If you don’t, why are you quibbling? about ANYTHING? Put up or shut up.
FFS, I have given you a sketch of a fossil-fuel-free system with sufficient surplus energy to SOLVE the GHG problem by extraction and geological sequestration. What more could you ask for?! Yes, current policy PROHIBITS that solution. THE POLICY IS THE PROBLEM.
You have refuted NOTHING on that list. Neither have you stipulated to the list. Now, unless you have valid, fact-backed objections to things on the list, stipulate to it and admit to the consequences thereof. Only then we can move forward.
nigelj writes @484:
It helps if you hyper-link your specific reference. On Real Climate, the comment permalink is in the timestamp; right-click it and select “Copy link location”.
I thought I had given you feedback already, but I prepared more for you. Different battery chemistries have very different voltage-vs-state-of-charge curves. NiCd and NiMH are notably “flat”.  Lead-acid is somewhat less flat. A typical Li-ion chemistry goes from 2.50 V at max discharge to 4.20 volts at rated charge, which at 1.68:1 is radically different from the former. Electronic chips dependent upon constant voltages for normal operation require power conditioning between Li-ion batteries and their own power supply pins.
nigelj writes @485:
Ignored questions:
* What are the GHG emissions of the remaining 20%?
* Assuming proportionality, are those cuts sufficient to start reducing atmospheric GHGs? (no)
* Is there enough surplus energy to get to net-zero? (don’t make me laugh)
* Even at net-zero, can we restore the atmosphere and climate soon enough to avoid catastrophe? (see above)
Positing 2.5 GJ(e)/ton to remove atmospheric CO2, it would take upwards of 2 TW(e) devoted to remediation to get atmospheric CO2 down to where we need it to be in this century without losing our arctic permafrost and firing the “clathrate gun”, let alone not melting Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Any plan that doesn’t hit net-zero itself plus that much surplus IS A FAILURE.
I’ve got that. What have YOU got?
Hopelessly optimistic.
That was obvious. Forget these clowns, they have grossly underestimated those limitations and nothing they have to say is worth a plug nickle.
nigelj writes @489:
TBH, they appear to be assuming this because they expect (or demand) the third-world countries to increase their production and standard of living to approach the industrialized West.
Such production cannot be sustained without massive external support. Watch Empire of Dust for a glimpse of the reality. If outside support for coal-burning machinery was cut off, both standard of living and GHG emissions of the third world would slope downward rapidly.
485 – nigelj
“12 hours of energy storage enough for U.S. to run on 80% solar+wind.”
Critical thinking nigelj – it’s a thing. Their claim is laughable.
Let’s see the details of their plan listing:
1- size and location of new/existing RE generation sites,
2 – size and location of new transmission lines,
3 – methods, size, and location of storage,
4 – quantities for all of that, including labor and material costs
5 – a realistic schedule for detail design, permits, material procurement, construction, commissioning, and projected cost of maintenance for the next 50 years.
Dude, across 100% of the USA the sun is below the horizon longer than 12 hours per day Sept 21 to Mar 21. In much of the country it’s below the horizon quite a bit longer than 12 hours per day for at least a couple of months. They are wild-eyed dreamers. They know it is abject BS – and just want to push gullible people into pushing politicians to support this pipe dream.
Don’t believe me? DO IT IN SOME OTHER COUNTRIES FIRST! Leave the USA alone. Greenies like to crow about the wonderful Germans and Chinese – DO IT THERE. See how it works out.
Engineer-Poet @496 & Mr. Know It All @498
Questions, questions. Don’t ask me. Find the research study if you are interested:
“The sun sets, and the wind doesn’t always blow,” noted Steven Davis, UCI associate professor of Earth system science and co-author of a renewable energy study published today in the journal Energy & Environmental Science. “
I just came across the article, and thought it would be of interest, and I haven’t got around to finding the research paper.
KIA, the plan is not all solar power. It combines solar and wind power. Hearing you talk about critical thinking is hysterically funny:)
Killian @491 says “Your bigotry (against hunter gatherers) pisses me off. Read this…”
This is crazy, and said despite the fact I said @365 ” there is no question that hunter gatherer society work’s sustainably and is a relatively peaceful and sharing society” which is in the comment he is referencing. Unbelievable but true.
Engineer-Poet @497, thanks for the link to the movie. I’m not inclined to watch it right through, but I read a summary of it, and the theme is interesting. I hear what you are saying. I found an interesting interview with the director below:
https://filmmakermagazine.com/35197-empire-of-dust-an-interview-with-bram-van-paesschen/#.Xd966pMzbIU