Posted on 01/23/2014 8:24:46 PM PST by ckilmer
The problem with that statement is that if they “run out of them in the ground”, they will be synthetically made. It’s already very close to competitive to biologically produce hydrocarbons with plant life, and of course there are the lower grade sources converted via methods like Fischer/Tropff [sp?].
Hydrocarbons are essential to ANY meaningful technological existence above the level of early industrialization. There is absolutely ZERO chance of maintaining something approaching today’s technological standards without a flourishing production of hydrocarbons.
That’d carry more weight if the top vehicle was actually a Chevy Volt..
“Solar that is placed on homes will be in addition to large solar farms located in areas with lots of sunshine (the desert)”
I don’t know if you are aware of this, but if you look at your electric bill you will find that the bulk of it is not the fuel burned. Instead , it is the tax and the overhead costs.
“It will become very cheap to make solar panels...it will be a kind of printer technology... even if they attain only 25% efficiency that will be enough to become cheaper than fossil fuels if the panels are cheap enough.”
Perhaps it will come down...However, I’ve been working with solar cells for thirty years, and there hasn’t been much movement. That’s not to say this won’t change... but I’m not hopeful.
“It is interesting to remember that all power on the Earth is solar.”
That is true with the exception of fission reactors.
“The giant fusion reactor that is our star supplies all our needs. Even the energy in the food we eat is created from that fusion reactor.”
This is true...
“Solar will merely be a stop on the way to our eventual mastery of fusion energy...someday most power will come from fusion power stations.”
This is probably not true. In that solar is even now efficient enough to provide a good portion of our heating needs, it is not widely used. I say that as an inventor of a low cost solar panel...
“Nuclear is the best source of power we have now but the greenies have made it too expensive to get a plant up and running. There are new types of fission reactors that are very safe to operate.”
The fission reactors were designed to provide for materials for bombs. Thorium reactors might have been a better choice in a perfect world... It still might be the midterm answer.
“We now harness solar energy by various inefficient methods, we need to convert it directly from light to dc current... this is what solar panels do.”
A big part of our energy needs could be satisfied using the low temperature from a solar hot water heater for heating homes or hot water. My panels do that... however even that has not taken off. It’s a hard sell.
“For solar to become cheaper than fossil fuel all that need be done is to develop lower cost methods for manufacturing the panels.”
That’s easy to say, but is you involve the current distribution system, it doesn’t lower costs that much. The only way to make it really worthwhile is to go off the grid.and you can’t do that right now.
“The problem of energy storage is more difficult but there are promising new types of storage cells coming along, they will be created using nano tech. What we need are much better capacitors...very fast to charge and long-lasting. The very large caps will have low voltage ratings but it’s not hard to convert to higher voltages with efficiency of 90% or better.”
This is a gotcha... The battery for my electric bike is a LI ion, and cost over $500, ordered from China. Batteries (or caps) that hold that much energy are bombs. You can’t even ship them by air. You don’t want them in your home...
I’ve been through all this many times. Natural gas is probably the best solution until the LENR’s come on line. Fooling with solar and wind is a waste of time and money.
Even if solar is 100% efficient, it won’t see the light of day until the electric company figures out how to meter the sunlight!
“Another thing that keeps solar power, or wind power, from being more widely adopted is that there is no efficient way to alternate between alternatives and hydrocarbons seamlessly If it were possible for residential or industry to easily make use of renewables when it’s being generated and automatically switch back to hydrocarbons when it’s not, or be able to store the energy created and make use of it during other times, adoption rates of solar panels would probably sky-rocket.”
That’s a big “hitch”. You cant start up a turbine and bring it online as fast as the wind can stop blowing or the time it takes the sun to go behind a cloud. That means that the “backup” has to always be running...
Gotta be careful with hi-storage caps. In USAF tech school, we were shown a safety film of an actual explosion [not staged].
The camera happened to be rolling with a communications trailer in-frame. Suddenly, the trailer blew up, killing 3 techs.
Post-mortem report on the cause of the accident revealed that [somehow] a hi-storage cap the size of a 5 gallon bucket shorted out and blew the hell out of the trailer.
You wanna drive a car with a hi-storage cap in it and get involved in a crash? Kerblew-ee !!!
They've pretty well homogenized all the models.
I've decided personally that my next car is going to be either a 55 - 58 Sedan DeVille, a 71 - 76 Lincoln Town Car or (non-sequitur) a Triumph TR6. The connecting thread is that these are all cars I have owned in the past. I have had a '56 Caddy, a '75 Lincoln TC and a '72 TR6.
In each case, I'm sorry I sold them. Back to the subject at hand. I think this might be a Volt(?)
Add-on to my post #66 ...
Its not the voltage - its the amount of energy actually stored in the cap that is the danger ...
I wasn’t pushing the caps... Bobalu was, I agree with you.
“Its not the voltage - its the amount of energy actually stored in the cap that is the danger ...”
See post 69... And the same holds for Li Ion batteries... My bike battery probably holds about the same energy as a 1/2 gallon of gas. However, to get it to explode only requires an internal short circuit. That’s why you can’t ship them on planes.
We don’t have the infrastructure to support all electric.
There is no way to ramp up electric protection and deliver it where required.
Like communism???
LOL
The problem of energy storage is VERY difficult. Oh, reliable batteries with relatively high energy storage density are possible: The ones we put in the Mars Rovers performed magnificently. They also cost a fortune. The people who develop batteries for electric vehicles will tell you (in brief moments of honesty) that they don’t really know how their expensive batteries will hold up after years of use in the field. I am a heavy user of all sorts of rechargeables, from low tech to moderately high tech, and it’s VERY obvious that even with premium consumer-level rechargeables, under “real life” usage, rechargeables past the level of lead-acid technology are NOT something you really want to depend on for your life or safety. (This is brought even closer home to me as I look at my outside thermometer reading 2.3 deg. F — in the “Mid-South”.)
One must keep in mind that solar panel and battery technologies are relatively mature technologies. Improvements, barring genius level breakthroughs, are incremental. A genius level breakthrough will likely occur, someday, but it could be next month, or in 50 years.
For now, I think I’ll depend on my local coal-fired utility, backed up by my petrochemical emergency reserves, at home, and my gas powered car to get me to town when needed.
Consider the above metrics and the real issue is energy capacity to provide reliable power (Power supplied when it is demanded).
Wind and Solar power are arguably 2-3 orders of magnitude less efficient in their capacity reliablity. Before they replace carbon based duels, especially hydrocarbons, it is likely our culture will need to change, accepting power consumption to be rescheduled on a daily basis.
The scale and orders of magnitude involved in power distribution will also dwarf our present transmission and distribution system topologies. Welcome a new age environment where towering picket fences of electrical transmission lines are encountered everywhere, rather than along major lines of communication.
Before this happens, we would more likely find space based solar collection systems microwaving the power down to the surface at existing electrical power transmission generating stations. Later, power distribution would have to become more easily accessed, but this would reduce its security, something akin to satellite TV reception. At present, that would be like microwave cooking your subdivisions, which isn't very popular.
IMHO, we're closer to becoming another wind powered naval power earlier than getting rid of combustion engines.
Picking certain things out from what you say (and, as an engineer, generally agreeing), a major problem, as I see it, is that there is no cost effective way to eliminate the grid. You have to have it available at full capacity for, say, a long cold cloudy spell. Dual systems are costly - no way around it.
That not to say that supplanting the grid (as with your product) or effecting efficiencies (as simple as putting more insulation in the attic!) are not helpful. I’m an admitted cheapskate and tend to lean toward those sorts of things when they are cost effective. Shoot, we have a lot of hickory trees on our property, so I encourage my wife to use the fallen branches I cut up for the smoker / grill as much as she’s willing. (This has the added benefit that not only do we save a few pennies on utilities and get great food out of it, sometimes she actually WANTS me to go fishing, to have fresh fish to grill or smoke!)
Up until a couple days ago, I would have agreed with that, and probably still do. However, I was shocked today to hear on the news that at least locally, supplies of LP and natural gas are short. Residential customers are limited, for example, to modest LP purchases, and industrial and agricultural users are being limited or not sold to at all. I looked into this further, and it is not just local:
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/natgas.cfm
Apparently the shortages are due to the repeated blasts of cold weather, increasing both usage and gas well freeze offs. High export levels of gas are also occurring, as well as high levels of gas usage for corn drying. Don't get me wrong, those exports are helping our balance of payments, but it would appear that demand, both external and internal, is more than keeping up with the (overall) expanding supply.
Costs expended on recent facilities are over $5/Watt of generated solar power with about a 40% recoup anticipated over the next 30 years by simple financial analyses.
The Obama financing of these green energy projects is merely theft from the public markets on a grand scale.
At least in our area, the local utilities are not interested in ANY investment in infrastructure at all. In fact, to preclude growth in demand, they subsidize CFL bulbs and other energy saving items, resulting in ridiculously low consumer costs (Pack of 4x 60w equivalent CFL's for anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar at local stores) and also heavily subsidize residential solar installations. (I thought it was a gov't subsidy, but a local electrical contractor set me straight: The local utility finds it cheaper to themselves subsidize reduced usage rather than invest in their infrastructure.)
Thanks for running the numbers. People don't seem to understand that cars are parked at work during the day in limited areas, not at home.
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