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Zkribbler
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Los Angeles, CA, USA
Feb 1999
time: 21:30
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Can anyone tell me, what's the state of the development of alternative energy sources?
I've seen windfarms in California near Livermore, Mojave and Palm Springs...so they appear to be reaching economic viability.
What about solarfarms? There's one honkin' big desert just over the hills from L.A., so transmission costs here wouldn't be prohibitive. Why aren't we building huge solarfarms over there. They'd work great in summer, when we need most of our power. (Decades ago, my sister had solar-powered water heating in her apartment, but it needed tax breaks to make it economically viable.)
And fusion? That was supposed to be the cure all, once it was developed. But that was decades age. 
Tidepower? Wow, talk about a renewable resource.
I always though Geo-thermal was over rated. You need thin areas in the Earth's crust, like in Hawaii or around Yellowstone.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:30
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Windfarms are sporadic producers even when there are winds (they're efficient only in a certain velocity range), and they're a pain in the ass because you have to synchronize a lot of separate little generators and provide protective relaying and transformation all over the place.
The reason you have three sets of them in California is that they were driven by Reagan-era tax subsidies (10% investment tax credit + 15% energy tax credit).
The biggest promoter of them in the US, SeaWest, makes their money up front by syndication fees. (I did some consulting work for them in '99 and 2000). Basically, they take a windfarm project, jack up the capital cost for a nice fee for themselves, and market participation on a per-windmill basis.
Even then, it only works on a fairly small scale, and if the power can be marketed with "green power" subsidies.
Solar is great in theory, and a turn in practice. If you want to invest in solar, California had a bunch of non-operating plants using different technoligies, and most of them could be bought from the lender for 10-20% of their original constructed cost. I don't know if they're still for sale, or scrapped now and written off, because there's been no interest in buying them.
There's two basic routes you can take with solar - photovoltaics, which involve mining and production of lots of toxic and expensive rare earth metals (Gallium Arsenide Phosphide just rocks, baby  ), or mirror arrays. Mirror arrays just present an avigation hazard, take up a lot of space, and out in the desert, sand and grit gets in the bearing seals, which have to be fairly loose to allow for thermal expansion over the desert temperature range, and the added expansion from heating the individual cells in the mirror array. So you have no fuel cost, great. You have a capital cost per megawatt that would embarass the nuke people, and then you have to babysit the damned things and constantly take array elements out of service to rebuild bearing assemblies.
Within the mirror array route, you have two main subdivisions - directly heating water for steam to drive a steam turbine, which means lots of piping and valves and parasitic loads for pumping, or a sodium tower to provide your thermal transfer medium for the water-steam turbine loop. That just gives you a different set of maintenance headaches.
Solar is great for direct heat applications, and limited specialty power applications, but it sucks on a large commercial scale.
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Sandman
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Sinister Penguin
Aug 2001
time: 05:30
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Wind power is decent. A negligible ecological footprint, simple, proven technology and relatively cheap. On a local scale it's unreliable, although a national network of windfarms eases this a bit, since the wind will always be blowing somewhere, right?
You need a windy country (Britain is good), and even then it will only be good for about 20% of our energy needs. Still, that's nothing to laugh off.
Despite the utter, utter pillocks who protest at visual pollution, they are getting built, often out to sea, where the wind is stongest.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Sandman
Wind power is decent. A negligible ecological footprint, simple, proven technology and relatively cheap. On a local scale it's unreliable, although a national network of windfarms eases this a bit, since the wind will always be blowing somewhere, right?
You need a windy country (Britain is good), and even then it will only be good for about 20% of our energy needs. Still, that's nothing to laugh off.
Despite the utter, utter pillocks who protest at visual pollution, they are getting built, often out to sea, where the wind is stongest. |
In the US, I think studies have shown a maximum theoretical contribution of about 1.5 percent nationwide.
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yavoon
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I think we should hookup all the treadmills, stairmasters, stationary bikes and wutever else in fitness clubs up to electric generators. a society of hamsters.
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mrmitchell
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You've got to remember that Hydroelectric creates huge lakes and does damage to the local (very local) wildlife. Nuclear, as we know, creates the rods that keep glowing for the thousands of years. Windmills just take up a lot of space, really. Solar power would be a good step down from coal. It produces so much less pollution and hopefully with the march of science (and DECENT funding) it'll have teh same or more production possibility as coal has sometime within a couple decades. But like I've said several times, centralised solar would not work. You'd need distributed production (solars on every house) for the system to really work.
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16-08-2003 22:28
That island has constant wind, and would be a good place for windfarms. 
Even if some study came out saying that nuke waste was only bad for 50 or 15 years, it's still a political hot potato and for those two reasons not worth it.
The only problem I have heard about tidal power is that it may distrupt the ecosystems of tidal flats such as in the Bay of Fundy. We should build Nuclear plants, they are much safer than they used to be. They would work best on coasts because they are a much better heat sink that the rivers, hence MUCH safer for wildlife. My area actually gets 60% of our power from dams on the Missouri River, BTW. 
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