Sustainable Energy, USA and worldwide

Not even remotely; I'm not even out of college yet. I've just done a teensy weensy little research assignment for the Power Engineering department, who are working with Alsom on the HVDC system, which is still mostly at the theoretical stage. My tiny little contribution consisted in studying the effects of gales and other such irregularities on the output of the turbines. Most of my effort was spent finding a suitable turbulence model; I borrowed an aeronautic Von Karman model and tricked Matlab into thinking of the turbine as a very slow, low-flying plane. It was all very slapdash; hardly my best work. I sincerely believe that they should just get their hands on a proper aerodynamics or aeronautics expert. But I did learn quite a bit about offshore wind farms, including the politics of it.

Cool. That stuff about how nuke plants cant adjust their output in proportion to demand never occurred to me before.

If you want to know more about the topic, you may read it here. In short, nuclear power plants may take many hours, if not days, to change their power output; they're base load power plants, not load-following, just like coal plants and unlike, say, natural gas plants, or hydroelectric plants. Boiling Water Reactors and Pressurized Water Reactors can get around this problem somewhat; the French, who rely a lot on nuclear energy, have made notable advances in this field.

I was wondering has anyone thought to try mini-hydroelectric generators in storm drains or sewage pipes? Or attempting to capture heat from computers and turning it back into electricity? Or are those a bit too out there for ways to generate electricity?

Also, is there any focus on how to capture and turn lightning into usable energy?

Lightning is not in consideration as an energy source. Way too little energy there - sure, there is a lot of voltage, but bolts of lightning last too short to make any appreciable amount of energy.

At the very least, with lightning, there's only a very few places where it would really be worth it. Cold winters usually don't come with lightning, and it's erratic.

That said, there are one or two places that are constantly being hit by lightning storms so...

The first two aren't that far-fetched.

Actually reading the article.

Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, much? Are we supposed to understand that the thing generats 1.5MW? How much time does a household take to consume that many Kilowatt-hours? My house consumes 6kW maximum at any time, and that's maybe an hour or two a day.

... That's a lot less reassuring than you might think, journalist.

How do they determine that "maximum that is theoretically feasible"? That changes a lot depending on which simplifications you make. But I think a power coefficient of 0.8 would be fishy.

Also, this is not new; they've been at it since 2008. They just unveiled the Liam F1 on Tuesday last week, huh?

I'd love to hear more from them, but the article did a great job at presenting them as quacks.

How about Pumped-storage hydroelectricity?

I was thinking about that myself, I've actually visited a site in the UK that operates that way (the electric mountain in Wales), logically wouldn't that be the perfect thing to combine with nuclear? You get the low carbon steady output of nuclear and the emergency "O god 1 million kettles are about to be boiled" power of the pumped-storage setup.

Dinorwic was exactly where I had in mind^note  I've been there too, ~15 years ago.

Pumped storage is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and the absolute most used method of energy storage by total energy amount: all of the other forms of energy storage combined don't reach 1% of the total energy stored by pumped water. That's how Bad Ass it is. And yes, it's damn useful and incredibly efficient; much, much more so than batteries or fuel cells, for instance.

edited 29th May '14 8:31:54 AM by TheHandle

And pumped-storage can also react very quickly — in some cases, in less than a minute.

Yeah my kettle thing wasn't hyperbole, that's the example they gave when I went round the place, they'd activate the electric mountain (Anyone else thing the phrase "activate the electric mountain" would be awesome to shout?) a couple of minutes before the add break on popular TV shows, so they'd have a ton of power in the grid just as everyone got up to make a cup of tea during the adds.

Yes, that is a beautiful phrase.

Wait, so Brits really do drink that much tea? And on TV shows as well? That's another thing I have in common with the other side of the pond.

About the pumped water you guys were talking about, that just means hydroelectric dams, right?

During WWII, the British government bought the entire world supply of tea. It was as vital to her armies as oxygen and food.

edited 29th May '14 9:11:46 AM by Achaemenid

They're kidna like hydroelectric dams, the basic way the power is generated (water going from one place to another though the system and spinning a turbine as it does) is the same but the water isn't naturally flowing in these cases. So while a hydroelectric dam normally sits between two parts of a river the places we're talking about sit between two standing bodies of water, so they open a gate when they need power and the water starts flowing, they then close the gate once they have enough power. However due to the bodies of water being standing ones they then have to pump the water from the bottom lake back up the the top lake, using more power than they generate bringing the water down. As such they're only good when you need a instant power boost, because they rely upon other power plants to give them the power to pump the water from the bottom lake to the top one (they normally do that at night when less power is being used).

The advantage of such stations is that you don't need a whole river system to build them, just two lakes close to each other on different elevations (you could even create the lakes), so they can be build in places that a normal hydroelectric plant can't be (plus you're likely to have less problems with fish in the system as you can just put them in a different lake).

@ Marc: see Tea and Tea Culture, British Section

edited 29th May '14 9:26:39 AM by Greenmantle

Uh I see. I don't think we have these in any kind of quantity. I know Quebec (province) is crawling with dams, due to all our rivers.

About tea: But it's just hot water, how can it matter so much?

Well, some of those kettles are being switched on for such heathen things as... Pot Noodles. The noble tea leaf and course coffee bean are not the only things people run to the kettle for during a break.

Most good British electric kettles are rated at around 3kW, which most North American homes can't actually power without getting their kitchens re-wired: a typical T-slot will only put out around 2.4 kW at most. When millions of households switch them on at once, damn right the grid needs to be able to cope with the demand.

Pot noodles... My god.

Well I was more taking a joke-jab at tea in general, but I guess it's good to know that my kettle is nowhere near as hardcore as British kettle.

This is also a pretty weird derail.

Your plug sockets are also weak, for what its worth.

" And yes, it's damn useful and incredibly efficient"

"damn"

I see what you did there