A Renewable Energy Source That Works
September 16th, 2008
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blog knows that I’m very much in favor of nuclear energy. However, that is not the only form of energy that has a high return on investment, excellent availability and is free of fossil fuels and the emissions that go alone with them.
So where are the enviornmental groups when it comes to the one renewable energy source that actually can produce lots of energy, reliably and economically? The energy source I’m talking about is hydroelectric. And while hydroelectric is limited in deployment by the resources avaliable, there’s a surprising amount of untapped capacity, even in the United States.
The US has about 79,000 dams, most of which do not have hydroelectric capoacity. Many of these dams were built primarily for irrigation or flood control. Others were built to provide navigable waterways. In many areas dams were built to provide power to mills or factories during the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. Most of these dams still exist, but their turbines have long since been removed or retired in place. Many of these dams are small, but some are large and a few are enormous.
All in all, an estimated 37 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity is avaliable in the US without building one new dam, simply by installing turbines at existing dams. That’s the equivalent of about thirty new nuclear reactors and enough to retire dozens of coal burning power plants. Hydroelectric power is not intermittent like wind or solar, but actually is one of the most valued power sources. Hydroelectric plants can be started almost imediatly and provide the best load following of any kind of power generation, helping to keep the system stable even in times of unplanned demand or loss of generating stations. Capacity exists elsewhere in the world as well. Undeveloped hydro reserves or even dams which do not have hydrocapacity exist in Europe, the US, Canada, South America and elsewhere.
Even more may be avaliable simply by upgrading the existing hydroelectric facilities to the latest and most efficient systems. In Canada and the US, there are several small and medium hydroelectric dams which still operate with the original equipment that produces current at a long-defunked 25Hz frequency. The current is now converted to 60Hz AC by inverters – a lossy process which would be unnecessary with new high effeciency generators.
On Safety and Environmental Impact:
The enviornmental impact of dams can be vast in the local area and they can also produce greenhouse gasses, especially shortly after construction when biological material in the reservoir rots. However, in the case of existing dams, adding or upgrading capacity does not have any impact since the water is diverted anyway, but the energy is lost.
I’ve mentioned before that dams have a much worse safety history than nuclear power plants. While this is true, it does not mean that the safety risk is necessarily unacceptable. In the case of preexisting dams, adding hydro capacity does not increase the risk of failure and may provide an opportunity to assess the dam’s stability to determine whether it needs to be reinforced or even torn down. Like any other industrial facility, a dam can be very safe if it is well planned, built and monitored or extremely unsafe if it is not properly designed and maintained.
In some cases, existing dams may be more environmentally harmful to remove than to rehabilitate. The existence of the dam for decades or centuries has created an ecosystem that cannot easily revert back to a dry-land enviornment. Thus, if the safety of the structure can be established, this represents a power source that has not gotten very much attention or enthusiasm. Some “renewable” legislation and subsidies even specifically exclude hydro. Al Gore, for unexplained reasons, does not count Hydroelectric as “Renewable” The Siera club hates the idea too.
Why? Perhaps because it actually works???
Added hydroelectric capacity cannot replace fossil fuel generation completely, but it certainly can make a dent in it. Therefore, I’d advocate that hydroelectric power be used to its maximum extent, as long as it is safe and of a reasonable impact. This is especially true in instance of existing dams and diversions.
More Info:
Swift River Hydro – A company which rehabilitates, upgrades and installs equipment for electricity generation on existing dams and facilities. The company is based in Massachusetts, a state which has numerous unused dams originally intended to provide power to mills and factories. Since Massachusetts is no longer the manufacturing center it was in the 1800’s, many of these dams are no longer providing power and are available to harness for electricity generation.
Responsible for over 100 megawatts of generating capacity.
Low Impact Hydro – An organization promoting hydroelectric development with a limited local environmental footprint.Many of the projects listed involve the installation of additional capacity at existing plants or the conversion of retired mill or industrial turbine locations to electrical generation.
A Powerful Revival - An Article from the Baltimore Sun about several large projects to add or upgrade existing dams to increase hydroelectric deployment. The article cites several large projects in the United States using existing dams.
“Wickiup Dam Could See a Hydroelectric Upgrade” - An aricle about the upgrade of the Wickiup dam with hydroelectric capacity. The dam currently releases water over a spillway, as its original purpose was not to generate electricity. The article also discusses the use of existing dams for hydroelectric power.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Good Science, History, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 16th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
It’s true. We tend to overlook hydro in part because it’s a legacy system, and in part because most installations are not part of the problem. However there are issues with multipurpose dams that have been built for water management and power generation as these two demands can often conflict. Consequently the amount of potential electric power (based on head and volume calculations) can in practice be limited by the dams primary mission.
That’s not to say this is a bad idea, in fact its a great idea, however one has to aware that there may be conflicting interests, and those who have a vested interest in the water rights in some of these reservoirs may take a dim view of such conversions, fearing a future where their needs will become subordinate to power companies, irregardless of current contractual agreements. This has happened before, and you can be sure the rural water district mandarins will know all about it.
In fact I suspect that if you scratch down a layer in the reticence of the Greens and politicians to back these schemes, and their strange silence on the matter, you will find the fear of exactly these types of conflicts. Nobody wants to loose the ****storm that would follow a major push along these lines.
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September 16th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Fine: In some circumstances there are dams that might not be perfect for hydro power or there might be some that are only good for hydro power some parts of the year and others they need to retain the water for water usage or something. But I’d like to know why there would not be a push to at least upgrade all existing hydro facilities to the latest in technology and in the case of other dams to at least assess them and install what we can.
It’s there and I think we all agree we have at least some room to expand. Why is it the Greens are afraid someone might get their water rights restricted but they’re willing to spend billions on wind turbines that destroy land value and do almost nothing?
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:51 am
I don’t know what the limits are on hydro and when there are dams that serve other purposes, but shouldn’t it at least be given the same kind of encouragement and incentives of other renewables? Maybe even more
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September 17th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Hang on. Aren’t greens in favour of something called ‘micro-hydro’? That is to say, it’s OK to dam every stream, creek and rivulet in the land for a few piddling megawatts so long as it staves off the necessity of considering nuclear power?
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September 17th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Aren’t greens in favour of something called ‘micro-hydro’? That is to say, it’s OK to dam every stream, creek and rivulet in the land for a few piddling megawatts so long as it staves off the necessity of considering nuclear power?
Greens are generally in favor of small and local power production. The idea is to minimize transmission losses. (And also the general hippy idea of rebelling against big corporations).
Small hydro usually has smaller environmental impact than big hydro, and is usually less dangerous.
Though I agree with drbuzz0 that existing hydroelectric dams should not be dismantled and they should be utilized to the maximum capacity possible.
About why big-hydro is not considered in the definition for renewables.. It is just a policy of who will get the subsidies. Any industry in the nascent stages needs some subsidy and encouragement from the government, to compete against existing technologies which have already realized their economies of scale. The subsidies should definitely disappear after a couple of years, but in the early stages they motivate a lot of investors to take interest in these technologies.
This argument is as true of new renewable technologies as it is true for new nuclear power (such as PBMR, IFR or LFTR).
This argument is not true for existing technologies such as 2nd generation nuclear power or big hydro. They don’t need any subsidies from the government.
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September 17th, 2008 at 5:59 am
September 17th, 2008 at 6:04 am
OK. Clearly something went wrong with the last post.
vakibs said:
I was under the impression that established Hydro is considered as part of the ‘renewable’ portfolio by the Greens because it massively inflates the contribution of ‘renewables’ to the current energy mix (at least when they talk about current generating capacity).
I also question the assertion that micro-hydro would be particularly environmentally benign if applied on an extensive enough scale to make a moderate contribution to civilisation’s energy needs.
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September 17th, 2008 at 6:06 am
Ok. That’s weird. what’s going on with my posts?
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September 17th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Test post.
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September 17th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Even if some of these dams will only provide power some of the time for water management reasons, they’re not in the same class of intermittency as wind power.
It seems like it would be possible to schedule days or even weeks in advance how much water will be allowed to pass through the dam as there’s a large buffering capacity and somewhat stable river flow; if more water needs to be let out due to heavy percipitation you could just bypass the turbine and let it through. The plant can still act as a peaker unit for the scheduled period as long as the average flow is the scheduled amount or less.
If you can schedule like that you can take some coal or gas offline; but it won’t happen unless you can offer strong guarantees that local water management won’t get shafted(or at least rarely).
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September 17th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Finrod said:
Yeah micro-hydro is like home sized hydro if you have a stream in your back yard and you can get a kilowatt or two to power your house. It’s akin to solar in how big it is. I don’t know why they’re pro that and not big hydro because microhydro is not going to ever provide much power. If the installation is less than a few megawatts then forget about it it is not even worth it.
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Soylent said:
Soylent, you have no idea just how touchy a subject this is in areas that depend on irrigation and flood control dams. The politics of water are harsh and unfortunately there is a history of watershed populations getting screwed because of some ‘greater need’ elsewhere. Some of these battles were epic, an blood has been spilled on more than one occasion.
The point here is that there is going to be serious resistance to these plans, which is probably why many of these potential hydro resources have not been exploited to date. All I’m saying is that the situation is a lot more charged than it appears at first glance.
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September 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
DV82XL said:
I understand what you’re saying. But here’s my question: Why don’t the greens push for this kind of thing with the same kind of zeal they do for wind or solar? Especially in areas where maybe the dams are not as subject to political pressure? Like for example the old hydro dams that may still run at 25Hz. Why don’t we ever hear cries for that?
We hear “We want wind and solar” all the time. WHy are they willing to disrupt so many lives over that but won’t even mention upgrades to hydro or instaling it where maybe it could work?
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September 17th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Sounds like an investment opportunity… let’s find some dams with ancient generating equipment and put together a business plan.
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September 17th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
\
The variable response of antinuclear activists to hydroelectric is no surprise; they are caught between two missions, the mission of making nuclear look irrelevantly small, and the mission of making nuclear look scarily large. Their sometimes-in, sometimes-out attitude to reservoir hydro generation is part of their tactics for dealing with this conflict.
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September 17th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Revitalizing hydroelectric power will not get mainstream attention for the same reason that putting out underground coal fires will not. Frankly, it is not glamorous enough, or it is not spectacular enough. Plus there is none of the martyr capability built into it. If clean cheap electricity can be generated using existing infrastructure at minimal effort, where is the glory? Where is the sacrifice for the greater good?
Face it Al Gore is not going to start promoting retrofitting existing dams with hydro-generation capability.
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September 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Joffan said:
Yeah, sadly there is such a long lead time on constructing anything like that.
Potentially there are pretty good returns. Just surveying old industrial areas with Google maps could help locate unused capacity.
But then there’s the long process of getting approval for the environmental impact, and I’m not aware if any states have mandatory feed in tariffs for Hydro-electric (laws which require electricity companies to purchase “green” power at an above market price). If there is a state which has such a mandate then you could make some very good returns!! You wouldn’t need to worry about variable pricing or negotiating with the system operators about minimum or maximum production. You’ve got a locked in market. This would also mitigate worries about changing the watershed, since you could basically produce whatever you felt like producing.
If any state passes a law that mandates feed-in tariffs, then I would be heading right over there locating a place I could lease. Once I had it leased, then I’d go about locating hydro-engineers and so on. It would be simply an awesome business opportunity.
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September 17th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Q said:
I think because they are shills for gas and coal, pushing an unworkable solution to guaranteeing the continued use of these fuels. But that’s just me.
Q said:
This is not what it seems. Some of these systems supply power for traction, which works better at lower frequencies, and some power legacy systems like metal refining that see no advantage in converting.
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September 17th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
A couple of things:
I stand corrected on the 25Hz thing. There are some dams that are still primarily 25Hz and they generally serve a dedicated customer who either uses 25Hz or in some cases DC, in which case it doesn’t matter what it is rectified from. These dams do have inverters to convert the current to 60Hz for the grid, but that’s not their primary end use. The 60Hz system would be just to sell any excess electricity or provide some peaking power.
One thing that is interesting. At least in the United States, most big dams that were built for flood control are under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. It seems that there is no real framework for any kind of investment in hydroelectric resources, and this is true even for dams that are well suited to it and don’t have to conserve water.
This seems a bit odd to me, because there are mountains of incentive programs and such to use public land for wind or solar projects, but if you call the BLM and tell them you want to put a hydro plant on a preexisting dam they don’t seem to have a procedure to handle that. You’d likely need some kind of custom legislation per dam for that.
Just like coal fires, nobody really seems to care much about changing this.
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September 17th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
You will not get much support for hydroelectric, even if it can be done without much impact and using reserves and actually provides a high ROI and energy return. You will not get much support for landfill or large scale sewer gas recovery. You will not get much support for solar augmented heat or hot water.
You will find fanatical support for photovoltaic and wind power. You might think why given the afore mentioned actually do have a good track record and work. But they’re not glamorous. They’re not directly noticable. People don’t see the massive payments on their electric rates or their property ruined with wind turbines. Also, perhaps for a lesser reason, they can argue “But hydro can’t provide all our power” and that’s true. It can provide some, but not all. On the other hand they’ll claim that wind and solar can, but neglect to mention that it’s technically infeasible.
The same goes for coal fires.
I am sure that the regulatory hurdles could be crossed and there would be ways of managing the conflict with water management IF there were a national will to do so and if it got even 10% of the fervor and support of wind. It never will. Sorry. The actual return does not matter. It’s a publicity game.
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September 17th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
So why is that Hydro power isn’t getting as much attention in the mainstream as Solar power? There are even cars coming out soon that run entirely on hydrogen fuel. It seems like a big deal yet there’s not enough light shed on the matter. Also, does anyone here know exactly how hydrogen fuel is synthesized and used to power machines?
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September 17th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Pete Aarons said:
“Hydro” here does not mean hydrogen. It means hydro-electric, as in dams and water turbines, like the Hoover Dam, the Three Gorges Dam, Niagra Falls – falling water turning a turbine and that turns a generator.
Hydrogen is not a primary energy source. It is generally regarded as an “energy carrier” that is to say that it is like a battery or a synthetic fuel – you don’t power a society on it, but you use it to store energy or transport it from one place to another where you can’t by electricity (like in automobiles – not an effective idea to give everyone a really long extension cord or electrify all the roads).
Hydrogen is made from a couple of sources:
1. From fossil fuel, primarily natural gas. Hydrogen is extracted by a process called steam reforming, although there are some other ways to do it. This is where most (nearly all) industrial hydrogen comes from. It is the cheapest way of doing it. Most of the energy comes from the fuel. The problems with this are that it produces Co2 in the process of extracting the hydrogen from the compounds (which are hydrocarbons) and it’s generally counterproductive. You may as well use hydrocarbons as the end source of energy rather than breaking them down ahead of time and using the hydrogen for power.
2. From water. Hydrogen from water is truely “clean” and abundant, as long as the energy source used to extract it is clean and abundant. There are a few ways to do this:
1. Standard electrolysis – Very simple. Pass a DC current through electrodes and break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. This is the most common way of producing insitu hydrogen in small amounts. But it’s inefficient. you may put in six or eight times more energy than you get back.
2. Thermochemical – More effecient but requires extremely high temperatures and potentially corrosive or difficult to handle chemicals (such as the “iodine cycle”) It’s been done in experiments but not yet commercially.
3. High temperature electrolysis – A compromise. Electrolysis of superheated water at high pressure. Much much more effecient than conventional electrolysis, but not as much as thermochemical, but it works at lower temperatures and is very simple without a chemical cycle.
IMHO, I like number three for medium sized use and number 2 for very large producers in centralized plants with many gigawatts of energy avaliable.
There are a few other methods, including photo-catalytic splitting of water and some other regenerative chemical cycles, but those are the primary ones.
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September 18th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
vakibs said:
Wind and solar are not new. PV solar has been suckering governments and investors since the early 1970’s. Solar thermal is over 100 years old. Wind has been around forever.
What needs investors are technologies that can’t work and don’t. They need a constant supply of suckers to sap new money from. If the technology works then you don’t need to look for investors because they’ll come to you once they see the profits.
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September 19th, 2008 at 6:59 am
drbuzz0 said:
The downside of Hydrogen is that there is a lot of energy lost during the conversion. With conventional electrolysis, only about 20% to 30% of the input energy is recovered. With recent advances using chemical catalysts, high temperatures etc.. this efficiency might get better, but not a lot.
So if you don’t want to waste energy, Hydrogen is not your energy-carrier of choice.
The plus of Hydrogen is that its energy density by weight is extremely high (3 to 4 times gasolene). So Hydrogen fuel cells theoretically will give you a lot of driving range, when used in cars. But, there is a big catch. The energy density by volume is very low for Hydrogen (1/3 to 1/5th that of gasolene). So, if you use Hydrogen, this fuel cell will take up a lot of volume in the car, even though it is not all that heavy. This will be a major inconvenience.
A win-win situation for Hydrogen will be its use in large aeroplanes, of the zeppelin variety.
There are other alternative energy carriers. For example, Boron gas fares very well against gasolene both in energy density by weight and energy density by volume. If Boron gas fuel cells become popular, gasolene engines will face a quick death.
And if your driving ranges are small, you can always use battery vehicles. Batteries give about the best efficiency in energy conversion (about 80% to 90%). Current generation of batteries based on lead acid will give you a driving range of around 100 km to 200 km. Newer generation of batteries (such as Lithium-ion-polymer or Lithium-sulpher batteries) might give you a range as high as 1500 km.
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September 19th, 2008 at 7:07 am
Q said:
The technology that gives you the best profits in the current market is not necessarily the technology which gives you the best profits in a future market. The task of the government is to make policy decisions to prepare for the future. This is the reason we need subsidies for new technologies (either nuclear or renewable power).
Market is like an ecosystem. If a species gets extinct in an ecosystem, its niche will be occupied by another species, and the role of different species will change. For example, in the epoch when dinosaurs ruled our earth, mammals were tiny about the size of rats. When dinosaurs became extinct, the mammals became bigger and occupied the niches in the ecosystem. Now you see the predominance of mammals everywhere.
A similar change is happening due to the extinction of oil reserves in our society. New market niches require new technologies, and these will be antagonistic to the established business practices (revolving around coal and oil).
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September 19th, 2008 at 11:02 am
vakibs said:
Okay, but I don’t really see how wind or solar could be profitable in the future unless the future involves the earth’s orbit moving closer to the sun or something. I suppose they could be ‘profitable’ in the sense of the individual making money with enough subsidies but not a net gain for society. Nuclear doesn’t so much need subsidies as it needs better regulation to encourage building, because nuclear plants can generate a profit on their own.
But renewable? With the exception of hydroelectric and geothermal (in some places) they just won’t ever be able to hold up. So whats the point of pouring money into them now? I don’t expect the laws of physics to change in the future.
IMHO, the best energy policy would encourage hydro to be used to the maximum extent, geothermal to the maximum extent – but those only can fufill maybe 20% or so of energy even if used to the max – the other 80% should be nuclear with maybe some gas in areas where it makes more economic sense. Also, I like other technologies that have been discussed here including synthetic fuels, district heating, plug-in hybrids, electric trains and transit. That stuff is good because it actually works and therefore is worth encouraging. Wind and solar is just a waste.
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September 19th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Ctrl Alt Del said:
It may come as surprise to some that there is still a significant amount of undeveloped traditional hydro potential left in North America. The National Hydropower Association (U.S.) river basin studies show a potential of 73,200 MW of additional U.S. hydroelectric capacity in 5,677 undeveloped sites. The situation is the same for Canada, including the Far North where eight major rivers draining into the Artic Ocean are considered ripe for exploitation. Of course this is emphasizing engineering feasibility and some economic analysis, but no environmental considerations. Despite the widespread belief that hydro is the ideal clean source of renewable energy the bald fact is that it is hugely destructive to local environments and can and does create disruptions to the hydrology of an area several orders of magnitude greater.
Geothermal is another potential source that is underdeveloped just about everywhere except Iceland. If exploited correctly, geothermal energy could certainly assume an important role in the energy balance. In fact the world’s potential is estimated to be equivalent to 22 400 TWh/yr of electricity (source: International Geothermal Association). This may seem to make the choice of geothermal quite a simple one but the construction of good geothermal systems are by no means easy to achieve. It requires skill in many disciplines and vast experience, especially when dealing with high-temperature systems. Geothermal systems also occur in nature in a variety of combinations of geological, physical and chemical characteristics, thus giving rise to several different types of systems. Not all of these have been field proven and this reduces the useful accessible resource base (that part of the accessible resource base that could be extracted economically (and legally) at some specified time in the future.
The figure for available power quoted above is somewhat misleading as it includes non-electric uses of geothermal energy; applications such as industrial and district heating systems. While these are important applications they are very market specific. If the source is not in a cold climate area, or if heat using industries cannot be attracted to the area, low-grade heat cannot be economically transmitted long distances.
Environmental problems also arise with this form of energy. Geothermal fluids (steam or hot water) usually contain gases such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane, and trace amounts of other gases, as well as dissolved chemicals whose concentrations usually increase with temperature. For example, sodium chloride, boron, arsenic and mercury are a source of pollution if discharged into the environment. Some geothermal fluids, such as those utilized for district-heating in Iceland, are freshwaters, but this is very rare. The waste waters from geothermal plants also have a higher temperature than the environment and therefore constitute a potential thermal pollutant if discharged into the surface environment.
The point here is that these two look good only when compared to coal, but they come with a whole set of issues that are really not acceptable if there is an alternative.
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September 19th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Ctrl Alt Del said:
In our industrial society, energy is money. The more energy you have, the more comfortable your life would be. There will always be a hunger for more and more energy, because human wants are, in essence, unlimited. Energy does not satisfy the basic principle of diminishing returns in economics. It is not a consumer good.
What is the basic criterion for any energy technology to be “profitable” ?
It should have an EROEI > 1 (it should return more energy than the energy invested in as input).
Renewable power satisfies this criteria, and therefore “theoretically” profitable. But in practice, this is not so, because of two reasons.
1) The direct 1-to-1 relationship between energy and money in our society, is not perfect. There are certain anamolies, because established business practices distort the reality. For example, meat employs 10 times more water and uses a lot more energy and resources (land, sunlight, electric power, plastics for processing) than say milk. But the difference in pricing is not so high, as it should be.
2) Though human wants are unlimited, it takes time for the society to take notice of the new pools of energy, build corresponding machinery and use them. In other words, the energy demand of the society can be calculated beforehand. Surplus energy produced beyond this will not get sold, and get wasted. In this scenario, different energy technologies have to compete against each other.
Those technologies which have a higher EROEI will obviously win over the others which have a lower EROEI. This is the reason dirty coal is the winner in the current market. This situation will happily persist for another 100 years, because we have coal reserves to last us till that long.
What we are trying to do is to factor in environmental damages into our calculations. When dirty-coal gets penalized for the CO2 emissions, it will suddenly become less economically attractive than nuclear power.
Once-through nuclear power using U235 will be similarly less attractive than breeder reactors using U238, in a similar scenario when longevity of nuclear waste is penalized.
With purely these calculations, breeder reactors using U238/Thorium can supply all the energy that we care for. And their EROEI will be much higher than any renewable competition.
But now we pose this question : why should we think of alternative energy technologies as competition ? More energy means more good for the society anyways
And if we have a chunk of renewable power (even though it has a lower EROEI than nuclear power) in our energy mix, our nuclear fuel will last even longer (and we might never even have to resort to mining the oceans for Uranium).
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September 19th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Sorry for the error in my earlier HTML.. I didn’t want to make it all look bold. I will be happy if the moderator edits my earlier comment
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September 19th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Will this fix the blockquote problem?
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September 19th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
George Carty said:
Will this fix the blockquote problem?
What problem are you having?
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September 19th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
DV82XL said:
Okay then let me restate this: I would like to see geothermal and hydro deployed to the maximum extent that they can be within reasonable enviornmental constraints. So if you have a dam that is there anyway and is already running off excess water, then it should be used there and it also should be used in places where you could build a dam with minimal impact or where building one would be beneficial to navigation or preventing seasonal floods or something like that. or if there is already some kind of water fall or natural impediment that gives water head then it should be used there too.
And geothermal should be used wherever there is a geothermal reserve that is untapped and can be tapped without causing any big problems.
All I’m saying is this: if we have any extra hydro capacity at all, maybe if it’s only like 4,000 MW and not all 73,000 but it can be used and it’s there and reasonable to use, then why not use it? Why not push it until we’ve exhausted all the good sites?
Okay, so maybe there are not so many, but why aren’t the ‘renewable’ groups that push for wind so hard at least pushing equally hard to develop hydro to the maximum extend we can without problems?
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September 19th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Ctrl Alt Del said:
Because hydro can be so hugely destructive to the environment the process of approving a new major hydro project is as onerous, if not more so, than approving a new thermonuclear plant, at least in North America. There is also, at least in the case of Canada, huge legal issues over native rights. In the States it’s water rights, and none of these are easy to brush aside. I suspect that the Greens and the politicians want no part of these sorts of fights for obvious reasons.
I don’t know if there is that much economically viable geothermal left to exploit for electric generation, but they do push for it to some extent.
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September 19th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
We don’t have commercial thermonuclear plants (fusion reactors) yet…
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September 19th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
George Carty said:
You’re right George. I originally intended to write thermal-nuclear but my fingers had a mind of their own.
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