Donald Sensing revisits the nuts and bolts of alternate energy sources – solar cells, biofuels, electric cars, hydrogen – from an engineering standpoint, with the help of Stephen Den Beste’s posts in 2002. On hydrogen;
…hydrogen is a fuel but not an energy source. Gasoline is both. But there’s no substantial natural source of hydrogen which we can tap, so any hydrogen we use can only be created by utilizing energy from some other energy source. Hydrogen is like electricity, a way of moving energy from one place to another. That’s why discussion of conversion from internal combustion engines to fuel cells in vehicles may well be important when you’re concerned about air pollution or changes in industrial policy but isn’t when you’re talking about energy sources.
Good reading, as expected and good commentary in the discussion.
It all boils down to cost….unless you are willing to pay the cost of the fuel you use you will have to do without.
Laws of physics will prevail and you will never get something for nothing.
Now if you can AFFORD it you can use all the clean fuel you like….but there is not nearly enough available to keep everyone going.
OMMAG
As this continues to become more alarmist.
I can foresee the day where all sporting Methane filters on our derrières.
With Co2 absorbers fused to masks, with a drool container.
One angle not utilised by the “One tonne challenge” or almost all of the enviromental groups is the apeal to the average Joes wallet.
Even though I’m unconvinced that Global warming isnt a natural occourance, if I’m told that going with a more efficient washer will save me money on my water and electricity bill I’ll want to do it. Telling me that I’m killing the planet for buying a less efficient model will get you sworn at.
Theres alot of ways we can go green and save fat chunks of money on our energy bills, all without being preached to by some fanatic enviromentalist.
Thanks for the reference, Kate. It is a very good article, and Den Beste pops up in the comments too. Steven Den Beste doesn’t run his USS Clueless web site any more, but it remains available at denbeste.nu/archives.shtml – I heartily recommed his essays under the Best Log Entries at that site. Indeed, the first posting in my own web log, on 2001-06-09, was a reference to his “Beige is Beautiful” essay.
One thing Donald glossed over in his essay are hydrothermal core taps, which Den Beste goes into at some length in his original essays.
Well, besides a good read without the kyoto-or-die in-your-face blathering by the unwashed masses of moonies, I finally now can patent my naquadah reactor and have a use for my dilithium crystals.
Seriously, the energy game has been a political rather than logical one for far too long. Yes, I do try to conserve but if I and others all drove nowhere then the tourism industry would suffer, less taxes would be collected at the pumps(but collected elsewhere) and the world would be boring. This would be especially true of the north where you can only watch so many snowfalls around a crackling fire… oops, can’t have that. I also refuse to ride a bike down the middle of Centre Street in Calgary in the middle of a snowstorm to get to work, get groceries or smucked by a bus. You can see what I’m getting at. The answer is not X or Y but all the alphabet with numbers thrown in for good measure.
One thing that the article ignores is the issue of Peak Oil. We are nearing, or may even have passed, the 50% amount of the world’s recoverable oil. Oil will continue to get more expensive, and with competition increasing thanks to the industrialization of China and India, it will continue to get more expensive and more scarce. We must find alternatives and they will come in a myriad of ways – solar, wind, hydrogen, biomass etc… No one alternative energy will ever replace oil. Ever.
So forget global warming for a second and just think of the practical reasons, money wise, for increasing funding to alternative energy creation. Oil will never be cheap again and within 75-100 years, we may just plum run out.
I note in this vein that Duuhlton McGreenie is closing coal fired plants here in the People’s Republic of Ontariario and replacing them with…
wait for it….
Nuclear!
Because why? Because natual gas is going to get reeeeal expensive pretty soon. Besides, Duuhlton probably has buddies in the nuke sector.
The reason to consider hydrogen is it’s a portable and storable fuel. Yes, it costs energy to produce it, as it does ethanol and even oil from the oil sands. The advantage is you can take unstorable power (wind, water, solar) and convert it into storable power. I wouldn’t want to power my home by wind and solar alone – a few calm, cloudy days and where would I be? But, if I had a big enough hydrogen sink (and I’ll be the first to say that’s problematic), I could store excess power and use it under those conditions.
There’s always an energy loss converting one form of power to another – that’s thermodynamics for you! – so there will always be questions of efficiency. For example, are you wiser to use solar power to heat your water than to try to convert into electricity and then store it in a battery? But, the cost of new power plants is so large, one might wonder whether 100,000 solar units producing a kilowatt each placed on roofs might augment the existing plants to a degree that precludes the needs for new ones. (And that’s not so far fetched – Canadian Tire sells a 120W panel retail for $1,000. Figure if you ordered 800,000 that price drops to $500 – that’s $400 million for a 1 GW plant; how many billions do we spend on each nuclear plant?)
Some of the assumptions are out of date about storage. Anyone who remembers the cellphones of the mid-90’s knows how big they were. Most of that was battery. As the batteries got more energy dense, cellphones got tiny. And there are other ways to store power; one fellow I knew developed a wind generator that could store power as compressed air. You don’t need billions of tons of lead to build air tanks.
Hydrogen cars make the perfect argument for hybrids. Most people have less than a 50 mile per day commute; a hybrid hydrogen/gas car could dramatically reduce our need for oil while reducing pollution, and yet still giving you the flexibility to take thing on a drive from Halifax to Vancouver, should you so decide.
As an engineer, I’ve learned ‘never say never’. And I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that if global warming is indeed happening, we should be learning how to deal with it instead of trying to prevent it. I don’t think the latter is possible. But I think there’s a lot of intellectual laziness that just looks at big centralized systems as the only answer, instead of smaller, distributed ones.
I hate to say so, again, but most of the enviro-nut-cases “alternative ennergy sources” are neither. Neither a realistic alternative AND neither a realistic energy source. Most are HOAXES.
You see, Al Gore, Suzuki types are not being realistic either. They are good Preachers, talkers, and good at telling half the story. Engineers or Scientists they are not. Why, then, would they not tell us that it takes MORE energy to make most biofuels than you will ever recover? Or that wind power is ONLY economical with Taxpayer subsidies ? Or that it doesn’t work in the calm, so you need 100% back up anyways ? Same with no-sun solar. Or that for any decent range, Hydrogen cars need a one-inch-thick fuel tanks as big as the car itself ?
Because of the non-investigative Media we are subject to many All-The-World’s Hoaxes on a regular, non-ending basis. like;
Perpetual Motion Machines
Alien Crop Circles
Y2K
Franken Foods
Time Machines
Snake Oil Salesman
Lost City Of Atlantis
Roswell NM Spaceship
Earth Charter
One World Governance
Bermuda Triangle
Fortune Tellers(Gore Predicting Climate)
Malthus Food Shortages
But they all sold papers.
The human species, as a social organism, has been working on the same two problems for as long as it has existed: (1) how to make their life better, and (2) how to fix the problems caused by their last attempt to make their life better. Apparently this causes some people grief. It causes some people to take advantage of this reality for fraudulent purposes. And it causes others to honestly beaver away to solve the problems, which seems like the best approach to me. Choose your weapon, eh what?
I guess what we are talking about here is THERMODYNAMICS. And Thermo-D is brutally honest. No fudging the numbers, and no Media spin allowed. Cause it won’t work in the end, anyways. I have heard of Peak Oil all my life, Malthius’s food shortages too. The reason oil is pricey now is because the enviros stop a lot of exploration, recovery. Same with refinery construction. But they happily burn up Jet-A getting to the protests.
We all can, and should, use a lot less Hydro-Cs. At this price I sure am !!
Interesting post.
I do think it is quite clear that since the second world war we have in the mean been building up a propensity for disfunctional consumption. I also think, though, that over time this tendency will die off. It will take another generation or two before it becomes widespread in technologically advanced civilizations, but we will over time come to understand that consumption which does not respect the form-follows-function rule is at best not economic, and at worse it can ruin your life.
There are many threats to the eventual success of my prediction, but they are all of the same kind: the irrational, the greedy, and the fraudulent members of our species. It’s up to the rest of us to work on actually making things better, on all fronts, from moderation, to efficiency, to new technologies.
May the mass times acceleration be with you.
Peter D: you say that nothing can ever replace oil. I would disagree with you, based on the potential for methane hydrates — they are not yet economical to produce but the resource base is multiple times larger than all the oil ever produced.
By the way hydrogen fans, did y’all know that it isn’t possible to weld up a steel tank that’s 100% hydrogen tight? Welded seams leak hydrogen, yes they do.
Those fancy tanks on spacecraft? They are EXPENSIVE! 72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:ulRqIbRa5gAJ:www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/pdf/104835main_friction.pdf+hydrogen+tank+welding&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=3
Those trucks you see driving around with hydrogen in them? That ain’t liquid hydrogen kids. That’s low pressure hydrogen suspended in metal hydride powder. ExPENsive!
Just a couple more inconvenient facts Algore didn’t tell ya.
193.71.199.52/en/energy/hydrogen/report_6-2002/22903.html
Or you can do your own google. Facts suck, eh?
By the way hydrogen fans, did y’all know that it isn’t possible to weld up a steel tank or pipe that’s 100% hydrogen tight using normal welding tech? Commercial grade welded seams leak hydrogen, yes they do.
Those fancy liquid hydrogen tanks on spacecraft? They are EXPENSIVE!
Those trucks you see driving around with hydrogen in them? That ain’t liquid hydrogen kids. That’s low pressure hydrogen suspended in metal hydride powder. ExPENsive!
Just a couple inconvenient facts Algore didn’t tell ya.
Whether or not something is expensive is not, per se, the deciding factor in rational spending. The key question is, what is the return on investment, in other words, what is the ratio of benefit dividided by cost? That’s the function you want to maximize.
The inevitable looms before us if we are to avoid the catastrophe of global warming: we must achieve a steady-state economy. This means population “regulation”, and a fully “planned”.
If energy requirements are proportional to population, then obviously, we must reduce the population. I suggest white people stop reproducing first – they’ve enjoyed a good right for about the last 300 years or so – but at the cost of social injustice.
Since the nature of capital is that it will seek the highest return on investment in order to counterbalance inherent risk, our economy must eliminate risk. Hence, a fully planned economy ensures that production meets the needs of the steady state population without increasing the demand for more and more energy.
If you think such a world sounds boring, excuse me, but think of the joy that having the arts community fully supported in the economy will bring to our otherwise dull lives.
Come now, stop tilting at these windmills folks.
Nothing inevitable is looming, there is no such thing as a steady-state economy, energy requirements aren’t proportional to population, you can’t fully plan anything, and biologists have a word for risk-free: they call it dead. Nice satire, though.
Ok Vitruvius, enlighten me. What IS the cost benefit breakdown on hydrogen?
You might want to start with the cost of 100% new torage and pipeline infrastructure for North America and Europe, because none of the existing gas/liquid handling equipment can manage high pressure hydrogen.
Also, there’s the generation cost. Right now hydrogen does not come from electrolysis of water. It comes from coal gasification. Think coke oven. Messy, disgusting filthy process that produces all manner of stinky pollutionary byproducts.
Windmills doing electrolysis? Great idea! How you going to ship the hydrogen?
But please, go ahead.
I shall be delighted to elighten you, my dear Phantom: don’t confuse today’s trees with tomorrow’s forest.
its not just the welds that are a problem with moving hydrogen. Hydrogen molecule H2 are so small they move in the structure of steel(rolled) or cast and cause hydrogen embrittlement and consequently failure.
consider that a hydrogen molecule is really just two protons and an extremely small electron cloud – heisenburg statistically speaking and therefore in terms of energy is just the reverse two electrons.
a much stronger bond is a carbon carbon bond. energy wise , high grade coal is the best next to burning diamonds.
Kate: thank you. I think naive enthusiasm for alternative energy sources is just as damaging as is complacency about CO2 emissions and peak oil.
My hope is that we will get a lot smarter about using whatever energy source we can find, as close as possible to the place and form we find it in. Wind energy for pumping water into water towers to pressurize systems – you store the wind energy by elevating the water. Passive solar heating – no transportation required, simple thermal-mass storage for night/cloudy days; and it eliminates the energy losses of converting solar into electricity, and converting fuel into heat. That’s just a couple of already-available low-tech alternatives, as examples.
I also hope that “dysfunctional consumption” will fade, as Vitruvius suggests, but I doubt that it will go quietly or soon. I think we will have to face some pretty serious consequences before it will become fashionable to live conservatively.
My fear is that we’ll get at those methane hydrates and say “full steam ahead.” I suppose we’ll be scrounging up DNA of things that lived in the dinosaur age, and trying to rebuild a biosphere that can cope with those atmospheric conditions. Maybe you’ve heard of the rapid appearance of new species after mass extinctions, and you figure we’ll just have another round of that. Ever looked at the time scale of that “rapid” speciation? It’s still millions of years.
Funny that I call it “my fear.” What does it matter, really? What will be, will be. But I still don’t like the picture I tend to see, of humanity gradually cramming more and more of itself onto the planet, like kids cramming themselves into a Volkswagen… and then a massive change, with humans perhaps surviving, but many many other things definitely not.
my best friend’s brother-in-law proved long ago solar is very economically viable.
but thats in europe where gasoline cost 3 X as much as here. just wait, just wait.
compressed air as a temp storage buffer for wind energy. see, now thats the kind of simple accessable medium we need to incorporate in our energy equation.
I just dont get why we still have to burn ever diminishing supplies of oil as highly volatile gasoline. as I said elsewhere, engines in 2006 dont need the really really highly ignitable gasoline to run; that was when piston engine were first designed and you had to do everything possible to keep the thing cranking. including using highly explosive gasoline vapours.
c’mon, havent we gotten beyond that?
I still think another way is to design a very simple solar energy to heat to electric power system could be set up using 100,000s acres of barren land for the collection panels and then just load all the electric power on the grid.
instead we dump millions of tons of air pollution generating electricity which once used, is gone forever but the pollutants are here swirling about the air for decades.
Robert J… and the reason the barren land is barren? …no people! That’s right, build the solar farms where there are no people.
Better not be any spotted owls living in those ‘barren lands’. Or caribou herds. Or sacred burial grounds.
Maybe that’s what Ditheron McSquanderous plans for Caledonia as it becomes barren. Good place for a wind farm, with a great source of wind blowing out of Queen’s Park.
Like John Goodman’s portrayal of an honest straight talk’n bible salesman in “O’Brother Where Art Thou”, I’VE GOT THE ANSWER TO YOUR ENERGY/ENVIRONMENTAL WOES: COLD FUSION.
Now close yer eyes, hold out yer wallets and wait until I borrow a large stick from our venerated members of the liberal left so you can receive a bonus lesson. It won’t hurt…I promise.
Lots of interesting stuff. I do hope some succeeds though. And often several pieces can make up a whole even if as he says any one cannot replace oil.
But he is right about problems with other sources. Like oil every sources has some problems that make it less than favourable.
Like Ethanol. Which works well until you count the energy needed to produce the substrate needed. (although a small amount in fuel acts as a lubricant so you don’t need to use lead or [sorry I cannot remember the current very toxic lubricant that we use]. But noone seems to care)
Or Wind. How do you get the thing to stand up in the air? Cement. Cement gives of CO2 as it cures.
Hydro? Lots of cement here too. but what about the methane produced when the water level goes down as you use it. Unflooded waterlogged land + lots of the right kind of bacteria (found everywhere) = methane. Which is far worse for the environment than CO2
Hydrogen is energy inefficient to produce and hard to store. (Though a Saskatoon company is trying to produce it using solar power instead of oil.
Biodiesel is interesting though it can not produce anywhere near enough energy since it depends on surface area to grow crops. (I’d also like to know what is going to happen when food is used for fuel. Grains supply down = food price up.)
Nuclear? waste!
There is no good answer like many in the media or various lobby organisations would have us believe. The answer seems to lie in sparing use until we can come up with a solution. Everything else so far is just a stopgap…. if it benifits us at all.
yo, mr shaken, you missed this part:
“and then just load all the electric power on the grid.”
if the said barren land is 500 miles from civilization so what. build the hydro towers which will stand for 100 years and just link them to existing grid at the nearest point.
same with wind generators, find all the nooks and crannies where the wind blows and plop a bunch of them there, then add THAT power to the grid. etc etc.
we’re the 2nd largest land mass in the world after russia, we should be able to do this.
whens the last time you saw a housing development in the middle of a wheat field? get it?
regarding cold fusion: I suspect the real answer will be found in ‘warm’ fusion. controlled fusion reactors generating scant readioactivity but copious amouts of energy.
uh oh, big oil loses !!!! not gonna happen !!!
I’m quite convinced we’ll work these things out, over time, as we always have, and as I’ve explained here before, so I won’t go into that again.
However, since apparently many folks commenting here are more interested in bloviating than in reading the referenced link Kate provided, I’d like to take a moment to re-iterate the points raised there in comments 58 & 59 by Steven Den Beste (with my apology for the repetition, to those who were interested enough in learning something to actually bother to peruse Mr. Sensing’s essay):
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The big problem with wind power as a source of electricity was nicely summed up by something I read somewhere: “flipping the light switch doesn’t make the wind blow.”
An electrical power system has to be carefully tuned, so that the power generation closely matches current power consumption. Over the course of 24 hours, most major power grids in the US increase total power levels by more than 50% over the minimum and then decrease it again afterwards.
The physics of it is stark: power generation and power consumption will always match one another. If you don’t do the tuning, physics will tune it for you, but one way or another they’re going to match. If you undergenerate, you get brownouts. If you overgenerate, you’re going to get explosions and fires as transformers and transmission lines (and appliances in homes) are hit by overvoltage.
So as demand for power consumption rises, they have to turn power generation on. As demand falls again, generators are taken back off line. Each major power grid (e.g. California) has a central control facility which monitors demand and tells various generators when to come online and when to go back offline again.
A heavy reliance on wind power doesn’t fit the control needs. When the wind blows, more power is generated. When the wind stops, the windmill stops turning, and no power is generated. Even when the wind blows continuously it rarely blows at a constant speed; there’s nearly always some variation. And from day to day, and month to month, there’s a lot of variation.
That means there has to be more reliable power generation capacity to back the wind power up. If the wind stops blowing, the other generator gets turned on to pick up the load.
And that’s why wind power sucks for the primary grid: most kinds of reliable high-power generators rely on steam, and that means they have to burn fuel to keep the boiler hot even if they’re not actively pumping energy into the grid. The central control facility is only able to give them about 15 minutes notice for when they need to come on. If the boiler is cool, it takes hours to heat up and become ready.
There are some kinds of power generation mechanisms which don’t rely on steam. Two in particular: hydro can be turned on and off pretty much at will. And gas turbines can be brought online quite rapidly. But hydro is fully developed in the US, is not very large relative to our consumption, and is also regionally concentrated. Gas turbines are not cost effective because of the amount of gas that has to be burned relative to the amount of electricity produced. (Gas turbines tend to be treated as last-resort generation for exactly that reason.)
So if you have a big plant of wind electrical generation, you have to have enough coal-fired steam-based plants to substitute for those wind generators just in case the wind stops blowing, and those coal-fired plants will be burning coal even if the wind is blowing.
Which rather defeats the purpose, don’t you think?
You can get some idea of how much tuning goes on by looking at the charts here.
For example, today minimum power in California was about 23 gigawatts, at 4 AM. Peak power generation was at 39 gigawatts, at 4 PM. So over 12 hours it was necessary to bring 14,000 megawatts of generation online to match the rise in demand over those 12 hours. And over the next 12 hours, 14,000 megawatts of generation has to go back offline again.
Texas went from 30 gigawatts at 4AM to 51 giagawatts at 5PM, a rise of 21,000 megawatts over 13 hours.
Nationally our power consumption rises and falls by 150,000-200,000 megawatts every day. Power generation must be adjusted to that demand.
The problem is that the wind refuses to blow at its hardest at 4PM. It blows whenever it wants to, whether we need it or not.
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If we could find a good use for HOT AIR former veep AL GORE could prove a valible resource
Good commentary here as well. I think many agree Gore is clueless and I wouldn’t pay dime one to see his movie or the likes of Moore. I have to say though that I agree with the criticism (not just from Gore) of using natural gas to extract oil here in Alberta and wherever else it may be used.
I am not a fan of nuclear power and it’s potential for disaster, but after reading a story in the Calgary Sun, by Licia Corbella, a few months ago, I have to say they made some good points.
Here’s a link to article. Couldn’t get it from from Canoe so it’s from Alberta Liberal Site (apologies); http://www.albertaliberal.com/clippings/News_Clippings_-_April_13_2006.pdf
I agree, Cheri. (Not that my opinion matters, but at least I’ve proven that I don’t always disagree 😉
The problem as I see is that energy needs to be sold as energy not as individual units IE Gallon gas , Kilo watt. All energy needs to be sold at an equal rate Joule then maybe the alternative sources would be able to compete in the more stationary markets like industry and housing. We will always need H carbons for mobile usage IMHO Jet planes aren’t going to run on electric engines anytime in the near future nor are tractor trailers.
The way we use energy now is just wastefull not in how we use it but rather how we don’t recover the energy. If cars were powered by hydraulics the energy expended to get from a to b could be recovered when braking utilizing the hydraulic motor to reverse the flow and store the energy dispensed in braking so that it would only be wasting in my estimation city driving 50%. You would still need a source of energy to power the pump which drives the hydraulics but the source could be suspect to availability. IE Electric, Gas, diesel, hydrogen etc. We need to recover more energy rather than become more economical.
Vitruvius:
The point about wind and solar is that they are not meant to be primary generators, for all the reasons you laid out. But, as sources to add incremental energy to the grid, they can be quite successful.
Arnold is trying to get 100,000 roofs equipped with solar power in California. He’s only 20% of the way there. As I posted earlier, it’s feasible to equip 100,000 roofs in Southern Ontario with 1kW of solar panels for about $5,000/roof, which would generate approx. 1 GW. (Just for comparison, the entire Pickering nuclear plant generates about 4 GW). Now, some people say “So what? How’s that going to help at night when the sun doesn’t shine?”. Here is the answer:
WE DON’T NEED ANY EXTRA POWER AT NIGHT. All the peak periods of use occur during the day, when business is humming, and a/c is running. At night, our existing plants provide plenty of power for our TV’s, ovens, and refrigerators. The advantage of solar power is the very time we need their output – hot sunny days – is the very time they operate at peak efficiency.
Now, esthetically, a bunch of panel roofs might not be the nicest thing to see, but if I were given a choice between an ugly roof and $100 extra on my power bill each month, the ugly roof might win out.
Oops. 100,000 roofs at 1kW/each = 0.1GW, not 1 GW. Sorry – still, 100 MW is nothing to sneeze at.
I’m coining a new term – “blithmetic” – for sloppy, blog arithmetic, such as I just committed. Here’s betting we get to use it a lot!
As Den Beste mentioned above, Kevin, California uses on the order of 39,000 MW peak daily. 100 MW is something to sneeze at.
I can remember back in the late 60’s or early 70’s reading about gas turbine cars. What ever happened to that idea? There was a Turbine car in I think the 1969 Indy 500(Andy Granateli). After that no turbines were allowed. Turbines can run on kerosene,gas most combustable fluids. They are fast and efficient. And quiet.
Sask is getting a low imission coal fired generator. Whay hasn’t there been more in the news about it?