Are Corporations the problem with the Energy Industry?

Oh, privatizing electric utilities (heck, privatizing ANY utilities.) Bad idea, I remember when California tried that, it turned into a bunch of criminals holding the government hostage while peoples' power was all shut off, and we ended up being governated over the resulting budget crisis.

@USAF 713: As the efforts of the smartest and best funded people on the planet over past 70 years have shown, fusion generation is almost certainly impossible, and if it is possible, there is no certainty as to when or how it will become exploitable. Mentioning it is like mentioning FTL, time travel, or antigravity: Interesting, if not terribly practical.

Current sustainable power technologies, on the other hand, are entirely practical. Though admittedly not cheap, sating our needs with just a tiny fraction of that potential is well within our means. How much potential is there?

• Solar: 89 petawatts
• Wind: 72 terawatts
• Geothermal: 44 terawatts
• Marine: 15 terawatts
• Current human consumption: 16 terawatts

Harnessing more than a fraction of it obviously isn't necessary, and of course this doesn't even take energy conservation into account. For instance, aside from the hilarious inefficiency of gasoline engines I mentioned earlier, about 80% of residential consumption is spent on heating and cooling, if geothermal heat pumps caught on, it would be slashed to a fraction or completely eliminated, depending on location.

Eric,

And there lies the rub, as it were. Without practical room-temperature superconductors or similar technology, you can only send electricity so far before transmission inefficiencies eat up enough of the source's output that it effectively gets into "fart in a hurricane" territory.

(Somewhere, an electrical engineer is screaming in agony at my horrible oversimplification... )

As for the numbers you mention, theoretical maximums tend to be not especially useful in the real world, and that's without getting into political issues (a whole other can of worms, and not something I'm particularly enthusiastic about going into, at this point).

On another note, part of the problem with the power thing in California is that it was a half-assed "deregulation", with CA politicians wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Compounding that was the NIMBY*

and BANANA*

^{Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone/Anything}

crowd shutting down power plant construction in California, resulting in the need to import power from surrounding states where CA's utility commissions had little to no input on things. Although the details regarding the non-CA part of the comparison may be out of date, this LA Times article looks into what caused the crisis at the turn of the century, comparing it to the deregulation plan put into action in Texas. Only one of the cited issues was related to the actions of industry, the rest was pure Law of Unintended Consequences material.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Here's who you have to blame for the California "power" crisis.

Enron. And whoever else helped write a terrible law, and then exploited it, including manufacturing a power crisis.

When a company shuts down a plant for maintenance early, it's irregular. When they shut down most of them...it's a conspiracy. California did not have an actual problem with generation capacity, the problem was with the power plants which were idled for no good reason.

edited 8th Jul '11 2:54:20 PM by blueharp

This forum sooo needs an eyeroll emoticon...

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Are you claiming that generation capacity wasn't deliberately reduced in an effort to force the purchase of out of state electricity at excessive prices?

As that link describes, geothermal heat pumps aren't primarily an energy generation system, but an energy storage system. They can store summer heat for winter, winter chill for summer, likewise between day and night, and even store huge amounts of “off-peak” power from intermittent sources like solar and wind (Electric/hydrogen vehicles? They can do it too.) And all that aside, they still enormously outperform every other technology as a mere HVAC system even in the mildest of climates.

Transmission isn't really a problem either, since the grid is already 93.5% efficient overall in the USA, and only 3% inefficient per 1000km using UHVDC.

The very first link in my post detailed an (EXTREMELY uncharitable) estimate of how much it would cost to completely replace some and/or all of global energy generation with nothing but solar. Of course, that link used $5 per watt for CSP rather than the more recent figure of $2.50-4, which mops the floor with nuclear even with after price of grid storage is added on. The NIMBY political fallout will obviously be substantial, but still better than coal.

Solar, of course, is more expensive and land-hungry in many areas than other types of sustainable power, such as wind, which is already cheaper than coal.

Wow, apparently all those idle generators I saw during the crisis were a figment of my imagination. That LA Times article is so full of it, it debunks itself:

Let's look at something a bit less retarded:

Oh, look, it's that niggle I was laughing about earlier in the thread:

Back to the LA Times article:

OOOOOOOPS!

Utility deregulation is nothing but a giant shell game.

Eric,

edited 9th Jul '11 12:34:19 AM by EricDVH

Are you sure you're using a geothermal heat pump properly? For one, they're heat engines, not pumps that generate energy, a heat pump is an AC. Second, if it's storing energy in a reservoir (I think that's what you're talking about) it shouldn't be "geothermal" as that implies the energy is from the earth itself.

Fight smart, not fair.

It's a bit of each. They pump a moderate amount of heat (or cold!) from the ground itself, which generates entirely new energy from the geothermal/surface thermal gradient; but they also pump locally captured (daily/seasonal air temperature from AC system, sunlight from rooftop thermal solar) and (grid) electrically generated heat/cold into the ground for temporary storage.

Eric,

If you could make it happen with solar + geothermal storage, more power to you, but I would still like to see IFR happen to start reducing the uranium waste deposites we've got right now.

How do we make solar work for places with serious monsoon seasons? I'm in Korea right now, and for weeks it's been pouring every day.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

^ Fast breeder nuclear reactors (at least some of the designs) can use any radioactive fuel from dismantled nuclear warheads to already-spent fuel from 50 years ago. (Spent fuel rods have like 97% still-usable fuel.) We won't need fusion to reduce the nuclear waste stockpiles. (Though to be honest we will need it alongside reactors like fast breeders.)

Secondly that's a good question about the weather. Here in Colorado we get about 330 sunny days a year. Except of those 330, almost 80 of them are not guaranteed 12+ hours of sunlight. The reason being the monsoon season exists in the American Southwest just like it does in Asia (same mechanism really) and it just started early this week and will continue until September. A second drawback to solar power in the Rocky Mountain region is called winter. It gets brutally cold some years in that region, so cold it actually can and does damage solar equipment. Meaning you will have significant maintenance and repair costs owing to weather extremes.

Its also the cost of materials. Don't you need really rare stuff to make solar panels?

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

Yes, but you don't need anything rare to make thermal solar, which is what I've been quoting figures for, it's just mirrors, thermal conductors, and heat engines. As I've noted, since the sustainables I mentioned all cost less, nuclear is a total waste of money.

Also, solar actually works amazingly well even in somewhere like South Korea or Colorado. Solar aside, Colorado has some of the best windfarm territory in the US, and South Korea in addition to wind is rich in tidal power.

Eric,

edited 9th Jul '11 6:45:43 AM by EricDVH

I believe the alternate term is a Ground Source Heat Pump. They are rather good, but have a rather high investment cost, and may not be viable everywhere. Still, if you want to encourage them in new construction, go right ahead.

“Thermal storage” would probably be a better description, since that would also cover industrial-grade systems like molten metal (sodium being the current favorite there.)

Regarding nuclear cleanup (depleted fuel, unused reserves, and weapons,) it would be more environmentally friendly to just stash them somewhere. “Nuclear waste” isn't just fuel, it's also “secondary waste,” literal radioactive garbage. Water, clothing, broken equipment, consumeable chemicals like machine oil… All of it becomes dangerously radioactive, and the only thing that can be done with it is the same as non radioactive garbage: Filter, run it through an incinerator, compact the result, and stow it somewhere for a few hundred millennia. Any attempt to “exploit” something as breeder fuel would just make even more of this useless and lethal trash.

Reprocessable waste isn't nearly as messy, besides, I'm sure there'll eventually come a time when somebody will appreciate the heap of radioactive minerals we dug up and refined for the Cold War, like planetary exploration where the atmosphere is too thick for solar to work, or evil space aliens. Maybe we can dump it on the moon or something In the meantime.

Eric,

What happens if we find a way to live on the moon?

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

How much of the moon do you want to live on, and why?

If it really bothers you, there's a few gazillion other places you could store the waste where it would be effectively out of danger, including deep at the very bottom of the ocean.

edited 9th Jul '11 10:05:53 AM by blueharp

Fusion totally works! We just have to find those Prothean ruins on Mars first, naturally.

If one doesn't use the nuclear waste for the fast breeder machines (this is out of my depth, but I kind of understand it based on what was said) doesn't it get buried anyhow? It would be better to at least get some power out of it before you throw it away, instead of just tossing it...

I am now known as Flyboy.

Waste suitable for reprocessing in a reactor isn't actually much of a problem. Attempting to get energy from it would make mountains of additional waste unsuitable for energy production, and the money used to do so would get a superior energy return if spent on sustainables to boot. Also, of course, there's a laundry list of other reasons nuclear is a stupid, dangerous, pointless idea.

Eric,

^ Fully spent nuclear fuel is surprisingly inert from a radioactive standpoint. Remember the process of radioactive decay is greatly accelerated during a nuclear reaction. One gram of radioactive U-235 decays to non-radioactive materials like lead surprisingly quickly compared to its half-life when a nuclear reaction is initiated.

Fast breeder reactors merely continue the process beyond that started and capable by conventional rod designs.

He's talking about irradiated clothing clothing and such, Tom.

That stuff is also "nuclear waste".

edited 20th Sep '11 6:10:02 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.