Could Marine Energy Be the Final Frontier for Renewable Power? (cnet.com) 175
CNET explores the potential of "marine energy," starting with "an ambitious endeavor nearing completion off the coast of Oregon, where 7 miles of conduit were laid under the floor of the Pacific Ocean using pioneering horizontal drilling techniques."
Soon, thick cables will be run through that conduit to connect the mainland to PacWave, an offshore experimental testbed built to develop and demonstrate new technology that converts the power of waves into onshore electricity. Once fully operational (as soon as 2025), PacWave could generate up to 20 megawatts, enough to power a few thousand homes.
"I get really excited about wave energy because the resource is so large," Levi Kilcher, a senior scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told me. Kilcher is a lead author on the 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report that compiled available data on marine energy sources in the US, including waves, tides and ocean currents. The team found that the total energy potential is equal to more than half (57%) of the electricity generated in the U.S. in a single year...
Waves are just one potential source of marine energy that scientists and officials are investigating. Andrea Copping, a senior researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, says there's renewed interest in another form of marine energy: ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, which involves bringing up colder water from deeper parts of the ocean. This chilly flow then goes through a heat exchange process with warmer surface water, similar to the way home heat pumps exchange hot and cold air. That process drives a turbine to generate electricity... A small OTEC plant has been functioning in Hawaii for years. Copping believes new commitments from the U.S. government hold promise for the future of the technology, which has also seen significant interest in Japan and other surrounding nations.
It's possible that concern over climate change could unlock new sources of funding for OTEC... There's also the added bonus that the cold water pipes can double as a form of air conditioning in the tropical locales where OTEC works best.
"I get really excited about wave energy because the resource is so large," Levi Kilcher, a senior scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told me. Kilcher is a lead author on the 2021 National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report that compiled available data on marine energy sources in the US, including waves, tides and ocean currents. The team found that the total energy potential is equal to more than half (57%) of the electricity generated in the U.S. in a single year...
Waves are just one potential source of marine energy that scientists and officials are investigating. Andrea Copping, a senior researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, says there's renewed interest in another form of marine energy: ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC, which involves bringing up colder water from deeper parts of the ocean. This chilly flow then goes through a heat exchange process with warmer surface water, similar to the way home heat pumps exchange hot and cold air. That process drives a turbine to generate electricity... A small OTEC plant has been functioning in Hawaii for years. Copping believes new commitments from the U.S. government hold promise for the future of the technology, which has also seen significant interest in Japan and other surrounding nations.
It's possible that concern over climate change could unlock new sources of funding for OTEC... There's also the added bonus that the cold water pipes can double as a form of air conditioning in the tropical locales where OTEC works best.
No (Score:2)
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[citation needed]
Read the fine article.
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Please demonstrate ANY other form of power generation with the density of Nuclear.
We'll wait.
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Are we running out of space or is there some other reason we need high density? Doesn't high density mean a single point of failure has a much larger effect?
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
High density can be very useful because that limits the size of the distribution grid you need. You need a lot of power cables if you're putting wind turbines and solar panel farms out in the middle of nowhere.
That said, I'm in the "why not both?" camp, in that I believe that nuclear and renewables can be complementary, producing a superior power grid at lower overall cost.
Also, while it might be that a single failure would be bigger, wind and solar are sometimes subject to "systematic" wide area low production periods. And it's still not that big of a deal - My target would still have 200+ ~1GW reactors. Which means that one failing would still only be 0.5% of the nuclear load going down, much less the whole grid.
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Hmm, more electrical cables or a fission reactor. I don't think that's much of a choice. The cables are probably cheaper too.
You need to understand the difference between peak load and base load power generation. Wind, solar, and tidal are all subject to unpredictable variation, and storing unused power from these sources is either very expensive, very inefficient, or both. You need something to reliably generate a certain constant baseline when it's cloudy, not windy, snowing, etc. The only current zero carbon solution to this equation is nuclear.
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The way you claim the weather is unpredictable reminds me of a joke. Two meterologists were leaving a car and the one said to the other, "you'd better roll up the windows. You never know when it might rain!"
Peaker plants are also expensive to run, that's why they only run them when absolutely necessary, just like the Tesla Virtual Power Plant. [slashdot.org]
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Tides are predictable [Re:No] (Score:3)
You need to understand the difference between peak load and base load power generation. Wind, solar, and tidal are all subject to unpredictable variation
Tides are, in fact, predictable.
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" Wind, solar, and tidal are all subject to unpredictable variation"
Tidal generation is variable, but it is very predictable. We always know where the moon will be.
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Wind, solar, and tidal are all subject to unpredictable variation,
Just facepalm.
For starters: mankind learned how to predict tides somehting like 6000 years ago. And with a simple tool, called slide rule, you can easily calculate the tides *for any point on the planet*, for the next 50,000 to 250,000 yeas in advance.
Wind and solar are predicted with specialized weather forcasts, which are called "prognosis". We know hours in advance which solar plant will produce how muchpower in any 15minutes time window.
Re: No (Score:2)
You just have to build a transmission line to it.
No. You do.
All of the renewable energy nuts figure that they will build their plants and somebody will step up with the capital for transmission lines, battery storage, standby generation, etc. After all the utilities have spent decades ironing out power exchange rules and contracts.
It all reminds me of the story of the Little Red Hen. Something they appear to have left out of grade school when they switched over to drag queen story hour.
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Wish I had mod points. For fuck's sake, we've had tidal calculation machines since the 1870s, and Laplace developed fairly accurate formulas for calculating tides a century before.
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Well, they will, and they are doing. It's economically viable and there is a significant amount of money to be made.
Of course, there will always be a bottleneck somewhere -- in the UK that is neither generation nor battery storage, but transmission because the grid is not being expanded quickly enough, for example. Interesting, the growth of offshore wind is likely to find a solution to that. We already have international transmission lines, and we need more of them. The next generation will be built near o
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It's funny that the whole base load category was effectively invented for nuclear power plants to compensate for their inability to react to changing demand. Talk about brilliant framing. In a way, renewable energy sources like wind and solar form one side and nuclear reactors the other side of the same coin. Neither can be adjusted to fit the demand curve.
Both renewable energy and nuclear fission can be fitted to demand with energy storage. The difference is that nuclear fission is a reliable energy source while wind and solar are not reliable. If there is storage on the grid, and nuclear power plants providing reliable and near zero CO2 emitting energy, then how does wind and solar add any value? Onshore wind will add value because it is really cheap, store that up for later when possible but don't overdo it or the cost benefits are lost. Solar power is
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3.5% per 1,000 km (620 mi). [wikipedia.org]
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Do you happen to have a citation on this? Because I believe the term simply means "the lowest amount of electrical power demanded during regular operation". This is applicable even for things like coal power, way back in the day.
Now, nuclear being considered excellent or best fitting for providing that base load power is simply an artifact of its characteristics. To wit: Negligible marginal cost difference between minimum power and maximum power, so might as well run at maximum power at all times, which
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Solar power is unreliable and expensive, which I guess is just two sides of the same coin since by adding storage to address the intermittency of solar power the costs only go up more.
It's gotten a lot cheaper, and it's reliable enough, at least over an area, to provide a lot of the benefit of providing power when power demands average 50% higher during daylight.
Keep in mind that not all storage needs to be electrical, and there is a lot of potential for massaging power demand out there.
The ability to turn off your water heater and pool pump for a few hours. Put a big barrel of water in a building somewhere, heat or cool it as appropriate when power is cheaply available(excess of supply
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EVs are nearly the ideal case for load shifting. With that, the penetration/market share you can have of them without upgrading the grid is incredible.
That said, we'll still upgrade the grid, it just can be a gradual thing.
Re: No (Score:2)
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Are we running out of space or is there some other reason we need high density? Doesn't high density mean a single point of failure has a much larger effect?
The problem with small renewables is not just that their output fluctuates, but that no single unit generates much power. To get utility-scale output, you have to put up lots and lots of units. Applications like rooftop solar at the points of use are a great way to stretch the grid supply, but as soon as you go outside the built environment, small renewables mean energy sprawl. West Virginia mountain crests that years of activism finally saved from coal strippers are now being logged off, with little contro
Entry barrier [Re:No] (Score:2)
The problem with small renewables is not just that their output fluctuates, but that no single unit generates much power.
This is a disadvantage... but also an advantage.
It means low start-up costs, which means low barrier to entry, which leads to fast evolution.
When first-unit costs run to billions of dollars, there's a huge barrier to entry, which slows and may even stop adoption.
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Adding small units to create a large output is marginally les efficient than building onsite to precisely match the charcateristics of the site, but the cost savings of building those small units in a factory totally overwhelms the lower efficiency. This is why there is so much interest right now in building baseload sources this way.
Let's build our energy sources the way we build airplanes, not the way we build airports.
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If you assume you can mount PV with minimal material (no concrete footing) the power density per kg of manufactured material of real world flexible PV is on the same order of magnitude as nuclear. Of course concrete is cheaper than polymer and nuclear power is more useful, but still.
Glass [Re:No] (Score:2)
Flexible PV panels have their uses, but big arrays are typically glass, which is hardy and low degradation. Weight is simply not that big an issue unless you're shipping it to Mars or using it on a drone.
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Nuclear power alone is just as useful as solar, or wind energy alone.
Nuclear power is only useful for base load power - nuclear reactors are slow to react - taking up to half a day to adjust power output. There is no peaking capability of nuclear so you will need a peaking plant - generally fossil fuels unless you have hydroelectric plants nearby.
The only way otherwise is to have a battery - the reactor design using molten sal
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"There is no peaking capability of nuclear" Perhaps not in the civilian nuclear fleet but naval reactors do not need a half day to ramp up steam production to provide steam for flank speed. With all the talk/research of smaller new gen reactors over a distributed network, Its possible the ramp up/down could be a solved issue. Three submarines provided power for the entire island of Oahu after hurricane Eva struck in 1983. "U.S. Navy, in cooperation with officials from the State of Hawaii, to bring the Quee
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Up to half a day, down to 15 minutes.
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You need a better definition of density.
For example, with respect to heat energy, having production concentrated in a point source is not especially helpful because heat is so much harder to transport long distances than other forms of energy. So for distributed heat generation, geothermal seems to be a much better answer. It is "dense" in the sense that a great deal of heat energy can be produce in a small space.
This is important because a large fraction of total energy usage is in the form of heat. Elec
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What does "density" mean in this context anyway. I mean, the density of power generation for solar is really very low because the sun is really big. It's just the capture of that solar energy that takes up space which is, I guess, what you are talking about. But, what kind of space? If you put solar panels on a roof, then actually very little space is used over and above that space that you were going to be using anyway for the generation -- adding some batteries might take a bit, although even there, if th
Re: No (Score:2)
log scales are for quitters (Score:2)
https://xkcd.com/1162/ [xkcd.com]
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There will be a point, probably not very far that the battery technology will be good enough to make solar and wind completely viable, and will also enable things like not needing to syncronize every power station in the country to the same exact frequency, DC power grids, just bringing power in trucks in case of emergency etc..
But right now, we have what we have, and while building new nuclear reactors is probably not a very good bet, shutting down the existing ones is just incredibly stupid, you need to d
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This tech is actually not very new and reasonably well understood. That _you_ are lying here notwithstanding.
Re: No (Score:2)
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No, it's shoddy research.
[citation needed]
https://www.techtarget.com/wha... [techtarget.com]
When headline is a question. (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is "no".
We've been trying to figure out how to extract energy from waves in a meaningful, economic fashion longer than we had electric power. It just isn't meaningfully doable. Wear and tear is horrendous for power you're getting, and mechanics involved are really nasty as there's no reliable way to directly translate random wave motion into circular one, which is the most efficient way of power generation we know.
The only "marine energy" that has any meaningful potential is attempting to harness some of the oceanic flows as we can actually generate a rotational motion there. Problem there however is relative size of any installation, remoteness from point of consumption and again, wear and tear. Salt water wrecks havoc on everything mechanical.
About the only other option is some kind of massive mechanical engineering breakthrough, that would allow us to get reliable and efficient energy extraction from semi-random wave motion without extreme wear and tear. Attempt mentioned in the OP is silly, but it's a good demonstrator of a level of desperation trying to harness wave energy. Potential is indeed massive. It's just that we have no practical ways we know of to extract the energy and convert it into electricity. So even massively wasteful ones like one in the OP is getting attempted. Sometimes its worth throwing a kitchen sink at a problem because potential of accidentally hitting a bullseye a kilometer off if a shard coming out of it shattering upon landing just happens to fly really fast for some reason earns you a lottery win.
Re:When headline is a question. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there are grid connected exemplars of many of these pieces of technology. There are two tidal flow plants in Scotland (using different technology), wave generators with several different technologies (Scotland, New Zealand) both in the sea near shore and onshore.
Indeed, salt water is corrosive, but marine technology is also very old and well developed. And because of offshore wind, we are starting to develop lots of infrastructure in the sea -- offshore wave could hook up to the grid connections of wind, even the anchorages.
For my money, I think tidal is more likely to take off, because it's extreme predictability will offset the extra price.
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The problem is not just corrosive salt water, but the forces involved, due to the density of water.
The generator needs to be built cheaply, be big enough (or otherwise scalable) to make it worthwhile, and last for a long time, again compared to the forces involved. Even with a good design you need to built a lot of them to achieve economy of scale.
Demonstration plants are fine, but if there's no feasible path from the demo to full-scale production of new plants, then they won't go anywhere.
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I can see lots of "special case" scenarios were if it were well developed, it would be useful. Lots of islands could use something like this. But I don't expect it to ever be a major factor. We'll see.
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The density of water is a problem but, also, of course the whole point. A water born turbine does not need 100m blades to make it viable.
I agree that plants need to scale; but the demonstration plants being built now are well up the technological readiness scale. They are grid connected, semi-commercial offerings, coming in with a strike price greater than wind, but only by a couple of times (i.e. still less than nuclear). There is also another going in which is not grid tied, but connecting directly to gre
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"In this particular case there have been successful prototypes with no scalability or reliability problems, just with some material-science related corrosion issues."
Hmm. Let me see where I heard that line before. Ah yes.
"Fusion had successful prototypes with no scalability or reliability problems, just with some material-science related issues".
If you have a scalable and reliable solution that require fantasy materials to make work, you don't have a scalable and reliable solution. You have a delusion of so
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If you think you have heard that about fusion, you need to have your head examined. Because there are zero fusion prototypes. Also, general material science issues are a whole different game than some seawater related corrosion issues.
Hey, I get it. You have to compulsively be an asshole. Just do not expect to get taken seriously.
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You really have not a single clue what the main problem with current tokamaks are, do you? Heck, you probably don't even know about the whole ITER project brouhaha, and how everyone in European side of the deal had a meltdown when they realized that money maker isn't going to be the test reactor which they won, but the materials technology center that came as a pair alongside it. Which went to Japan in the deal for funding the whole project.
Because we know how tokamak style fusion reactor works. We understa
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Here's one I know of with a funky concept that tries to work around these challenges: Wavepiston [wavepiston.dk]
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This project is also interesting: https://www.waveswell.com/tech... [waveswell.com]
It does not have any moving parts in contact with the sea. It is an eyesore, though.
Re: When headline is a question. (Score:2)
Re: When headline is a question. (Score:2)
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The key problem with MSRs isn't a technological one, it's a political one. It's trivial to make a MSR a breeder.
And we don't want that in most countries of the planet.
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I believe you are implying that breeder reactors produce weapon grade material. MSRs are horrible at producing weapon grade material because all the isotopes get mixed up in the salt, unlike solid fuel reactors where the isotopes stay in their little individual zirconium tubes for easy separation later.
A big problem with breeders that produce uranium is that a lot of U-234 builds up, that is an isotope that will spoil weapon grade material since it is difficult to separate out from U-235 and likes to soak
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What safety and waste issues?
I've seen an increase in YouTube videos and articles posted on the internet about how safe nuclear power has been and that the waste problem is largely political. There are fewer and fewer people believing the lies about nuclear power as time moves on. If anyone believes nuclear power to be unsafe then just do some internet searches with whichever search engine you like to see how nuclear power safety compares to other options. Nuclear power is not safe because no energy sour
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The actual problem is proliferation risk. Political wankery and braindead takes from resident Social Justice Idiot amimojo aside, there are very real nuclear weapons proliferation concerns that come with enriching fuel back to the level where we can put it back into reactor again.
The other problem is cost. Making fuel from raw uranium is actually very cheap. Enriching used fuel is more expensive. Still dirt cheap compared to pretty much all other sources of energy, but significantly more expensive than just
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The actual problem is proliferation risk.
How so? Explain how this works. As I've seen explained the enrichment of spent fuel will lead to an increase in the level of U-234, and U-234 is bad for making weapons. Enriching plutonium from spent fuel has a similar problem, it leads to increasing levels of Pu-238 and Pu-238 is bad for weapons. Thorium fuel will also lead to U-234 ruining the uranium enrichment for weapons.
You appear to confuse enrichment with reprocessing. Spent fuel is not enriched to make new fuel because it is already quite "ric
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Enrichment is one of the stages of reprocessing, and results in weapons grade plutonium. We're not talking about uranium based designs, but plutonium based ones.
The argument is that your typical fuel "reprocessing" as you call it and "enrichment" as I call the specific stage gets you about 80% of what you need for a plutonium based weapon, including what is probably the hardest part. Getting actual high purity plutonium-239. Yes, cycling through allotropic phases is still super hard, and you don't do that w
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Enrichment is one of the stages of reprocessing, and results in weapons grade plutonium.
Do you have a citation for this? I did some quick searches of the internet to see if weapon grade plutonium could be extracted from spent fuel and that can happen, but it doesn't happen because the reprocessing being done since reprocessing was a thing doesn't go through the steps required to get weapon grade plutonium. Not all reprocessing will result in weapon grade plutonium.
The argument is that your typical fuel "reprocessing" as you call it and "enrichment" as I call the specific stage...
Words mean things and "reprocessing" and "enrichment" are different processes. I'm using the words differently than you because
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Ahh yes, proliferation issues.
Heaven forbid we waste money making ( and maintaining) warhead number 1,999! After all having "only" 1,998 is TOTALLY going to prevent nuclear holocaust!!
That's a big ass /sarcasm, you know just in case you missed it.
Proliferation concerns are just fucking retarded. Technically we could scavenge PU-239 from spent fuel. Not much, but with the spent fuel we have laying around probably enough to make a few more firecrackers. That's also what makes it possible to you know, burn do
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>Heaven forbid we waste money making ( and maintaining) warhead number 1,999! After all having "only" 1,998 is TOTALLY going to prevent nuclear holocaust!!
Current numbers seem to be holding just fine. Citation: war in Ukraine. Your sarcasm is severely misdirected, to the point where it manages to hit a bullseye as if it's true. It's also ridiculously uneconomical to make weapons grade Pu-239 out of existing reactor fuel rather than dedicated reactors. This is something that actors that do not have access
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What exactly is unsafe about solar, wind, and hydro again?
Do an internet search for "deaths per terawatt hour" with your favored search engine and you will find sources like this: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
There's many other web sites that show similar charts but they all seem to come from the same handful of studies done years ago. Hydroelectric dams have such a high number in large part because of a single dam failure in China that killed a lot of people from the resulting flooding. The deaths from nuclear power are similarly skewed by a singular incide
Shooting us in the foot (Score:2)
Farking short-sighted greed.
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It's all insignificant. The GP was complaining about an insignificant effect AND got it in the wrong direction.
zero-sum game (Score:5, Interesting)
these solutions mean mostly redistribution of heat, not releasing stored energy (chemical, nuclear) that would otherwise not contribute to the energy balance.
Even if so, the direct effect of "new" heat on the global thermal equilibrium is totally negligible.
What causes problems are secondary effects (CO2 et al.)
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Not negligible but not our current biggest problem.
Our energy growth will eventually cause problems in the next few hundred years regardless of how we generate it though.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/201... [ucsd.edu]
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Great article, thanks for the link!
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Actually, this has been considered and is not a factor. CO2 and Methane have so massively more impact that this one here does not matter at all. And if you consider that this replaces CO2 generating Installations, the effect becomes positive. CO2 does a massively more damage than the heat that is generated when creating that CO2 by burning stuff. That is the whole reason we are in this mess. The actual heat from energy generation is negligible overall.
We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why it's so important that we push renewable technology and make sure it is available to developing nations. If they can build their infrastructure from the ground up to be suited to renewables, that will hugely limit their peak emissions. By demonstrating a high quality of life with renewable power, they will have confidence to adopt it.
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That's why it's so important that we push renewable technology and make sure it is available to developing nations.
I think what you meant is: That's why it's so important that we demonstrate renewable technology work at scale and make sure it is available to developing nations.
Is there already a developped country which is powered mainly by renewables, and which emits less than 50g CO2eq/kWh (if yes, please quote your source)? Not that I know of, even though developed nations have way more money to throw at the problem than developing ones.
In that case, pushing for renewables only (emphasis on the only) is pure hypocris
Re:We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:5, Informative)
Iceland. 73% tidal, 27% geothermal for electricity. Heating is 99% geothermal.
Norway is also over 90% hydro for electricity, with the bulk of the rest being wind. Heating is more mixed, with a lot of waste burning and biofuel.
Costa Rica is also almost entirely renewable for electricity generation.
Source: https://www.grupoice.com/wps/w... [grupoice.com]
Kenya is over 90% renewable.
There are more, but I think the most interesting one is Germany. They aren't there yet but they have a legally backed target of 80% renewable energy by 2030, and are working towards that. They get a lot of hate for shutting down nuclear, but nuclear isn't an option for a lot of nations, especially developing ones. Germany is doing the hard work of converting a fairly dirty grid, and the experience and technology is already being exported.
Re:We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:5, Insightful)
They get a lot of hate for shutting down nuclear,
No, they get a lot of hate for emitting a shitload of CO2, although they had the means to be amongst the best for the last 40 years but they chose not to. And they still emit a shitload of CO2, as you already know, especially per kWh generated. We'll see what the future holds for them, but we will probably be able to still say the same in 10 years. Which is proof that their communication strategy is working.
Thanks for the examples though, although Iceland and Norway are kinda special in their own way, due to the nature of their landscape, and the low density of population that they have. Iceland is 345k inhabitants for instance, and they CO2 per capita is one of the worst due to the fact they have to import almost everything, and are using big 4-wheels to drive around the country. Very nice country if you have the chance to visit though, just not a good example in terms of what we need to do for the climate.
Kenya is interesting, although the sources I found say: "Despite significant strides in renewable energy development, about a quarter of the Kenyan population still lacks access to electricity, necessitating policy changes to diversify the energy generation mix". Not sure it qualifies as a "working example".
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Germany has that legally binding target for 2030, and it does force politicians to act. They are well on their way to it and if they keep up the pace should get there. They have been steadily reducing their use of coal, for example, and gas.
Every country is special in its own way. Every country has unique geography and geo politics. Norway exports a lot of oil, but has the chance to switch to exporting electricity. They have massive North Sea wind resources, for example. While the Middle Eastern oil produce
Re:We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting point.
One thing that strikes me about the renewable energy conversation is that if any fraction of these new energy initiatives work, we will have a lot more energy available at a lower price. I say lower price because it seems the likelihood of raising the price of carbon-emitting energy sources is relatively low at this point, so new options will almost certainly have to be priced lower to be competitive. And since (non-baseload) solar and wind are already below the cost of fossil fuels for electricity generation, any new electrical generation will also be competing with that. Heating might be a different story, but it's still hard to see widespread carbon pricing happening in the short term.
I can imagine in a decade or two we will be awash in cheap energy. I wonder if anyone has thought through the consequences of that.
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On the one hand it's likely that demand shaping and interconnects will stabilize the price of grid energy somewhat. On the other, if you have your own generation and/or storage, i.e. solar on your roof, with batteries or hot water storage, then for individual households energy could be basically "free". Of course there is a cost to buy the panels and maintain the system. Battery storage could be the car you were going to buy anyway.
It will be interesting to see what happens with standing charges and grid co
Re:We need about ~1500 of these new power plants (Score:5, Informative)
Iceland. 73% tidal, 27% geothermal for electricity. Heating is 99% geothermal.
Norway is also over 90% hydro for electricity, with the bulk of the rest being wind. Heating is more mixed, with a lot of waste burning and biofuel.
Costa Rica is also almost entirely renewable for electricity generation.
Each of these countries is uniquely positioned to take advantage of local, natural renewables. Some of them -- like Iceland -- also benefit from extremely sparse population densities. This is not the case for the rest of the globe. The areas where this is feasible are extremely limited.
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So what is the excuse of other countries that also have excellent renewable resources but have not exploited them yet?
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The United States. Massive offshore and onshore wind resources.
Russia really messed up invading Ukraine (Score:2)
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That's why it's so important that we push renewable technology and make sure it is available to developing nations. If they can build their infrastructure from the ground up to be suited to renewables, that will hugely limit their peak emissions. By demonstrating a high quality of life with renewable power, they will have confidence to adopt it.
Developing nations are least equipped to pay the higher costs associated with this concept.
You are making the absolutely unwarranted assumption that renewable sources are higher cost.
Large central power stations are cheap in developed nations because we already have invested in the infrastructure of power distribution, and have already paid the large buy-in costs of billion-dollar powerplants producing many GWs. Developing countries, that do not already have that huge sunk cost, are much better place for renewables, which can be incrementally developed at low buy-in costs.
Ten thousand Hoover dams (Score:3)
The world consumes about 19 terawatts of electricity per hour,
"Terawatts per hour" is a not a unit of energy production ("watts" already includes "per unit time"). If you want people to listen to your comments, accurate terminology would help. (I agree that the fact that many internet sources use mixed units like "gigawatt-hours per year" confuses things.)
In any case, Hoover dam is 2 GW, and 19TW/2GW = 10,000. World electrical consumption is ten thousand times the power of Hoover dam (not a hundred)
https://powerauthority.org/abo... [powerauthority.org]
Yes, for once (Score:2)
Wave-generators deliver power also when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, the nukes are shut down because of missing and too hot cooling waters....
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That is why you want tidal in the mix as well. Nobody is stopping the moon anytime soon.
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...the nukes are shut down because of missing and too hot cooling waters....
Or because of massive safety issues, like in France currently. To be fair, France had to shut down river-cooled nukes in warmer summers as well.
Not a large resource (Score:2)
So, if we harness all waves, tides, and ocean currents around the US, we can produce half the electricity needed. Electricity production is likely to go up by an order of magnitude, as heating, transport, and industrial processes switch. By then, harnessing all waves, tides, and ocean currents will cover less than 10% of the required power.
That is not a large resource. That is a pathetically small one, and one which requires covering the ocean in energy harvesters.
Wave power has been scamming investors for
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So, if we harness all waves, tides, and ocean currents around the US, we can produce half the electricity needed.
Nope. This is like mistaking "oil reserves" as "once we pull that much oil out it is all gone" rather than "This is the amount we can pull at $X per barrel, given new technology or a higher price, more would be available."
Reading the actual report, they use the term "technically available". This means that, doing things like avoiding blocking harbors, shipping routes, lower power wave areas, and using existing technology(at existing efficiency rates) for large fields, avoiding harming the wildlife, and al
The answer is no (Score:2)
No.
The article says wave power could be equivalent to 57% of current US electricity production. Meanwhile wind power is several times that and solar is hundreds of times that, and they occur inland, not just at the coasts.
Further, wind turbines and solar panels are mature, mass-produced technologies that are already cheaper than fossil fuels and get cheaper every year. Wave and OTEC could move that way, but they're up against some pretty big barriers (1) a corrosive, difficult environment for installation,
Re: The answer is no (Score:2)
And before you come at me about how wind and solar are intermittent and OTEC or nuclear are steady: I'm amazed at the technical pessimism around here when it comes to energy storage or syncing demand to supply in the grid.
With a few batteries or simple tech solutions like better scheduling of water heaters and EV chargers or storing cooling energy as ice, we can use 95% of wind and solar power on the same day it is produced.
And on days with more wind and sun than we need (most of them), we can make hydrogen
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Indeed. In the end, any tech that is clean and can produce power at reasonably competitive rates is desirable to have in the mix. The more diverse power generation gets, the more reliable it is. Nuclear does not qualify due to excessive cost, high risk-cost, inflexibility and unreliability.
The only "rational" reason for nukes is being able to make bomb-material. That was the original motivation (e.g. Windscale) and that has not changed. That is also the only reason why the extreme costs for this otherwise f
Greetings from Cape Cod (Score:2)
They've got offshore wind here just off Martha's Vineyard island, and the most disruption it's caused so far is when they had to dig up a road to run the giant cables under it from the shore where they landed. https://www.vineyardwind.com/ [vineyardwind.com]
They've only done test builds and power tests, but it's supposed to start supplying power to the grid shortly. Literally anything is better than continuing to pay Eversource their monopoly pr
Read this wrong (Score:2)
OK, just my opinion (Score:2)
Look, I know that wind energy is vast, and we're only taking a teeny bit of it.
Wave energy is a HUGE amount of energy that we're only talking about scratching an infinitesimal portion for ourselves.
70% of the planet is ocean; pulling up driblets of cold water isn't making a difference....
BUT....
There's a niggling voice in the back of my head thinking about the scene where Don and Betty go for a picnic, he crushes a beer can and whips it off into the forest.
We used to think that a lot of the stuff we did did
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> Don and Betty go for a picnic, he crushes a beer can and whips it off into the forest. ... and then she cleans up the rest by shaking everything off the picnic blanket onto the ground.
Geothermal? (Score:2)
Remember, Geothermal energy is available from every point on the globe -- it's simply more difficult to reach if you're not near an active volcano (like in Iceland). This is yet another form of energy we could tap, should we ever decide to get serious about eliminating petroleum from our daily diet.
I see ... (Score:2)
Yeah, sure (Score:2)
"Could Marine Energy Be the Final Frontier for Renewable Power?"
Well, let's see...
> where 7 miles of conduit were laid under the floor of the Pacific Ocean
Ok...
> enough to power a few thousand homes.
Morgan Freeman's voice: "...it was not"
This Is NOT New (Score:2)
Back in the 30's, this guy just used a pipe to move cold water up from the depths:
https://argonautes.club/george... [argonautes.club]
Okay, so it didn't work out very well. But it sure proved the concept.
I faintly remember another experiment back in the 30's or 40's, one done on the really cheap and simple. I seem to recall a bunch of scrap iron (old radiators and such) cabled together and sunk into the depths right off the Cuban shoreline. The cable ran to another huge chunk of scrap iron submerged in a big asphalt-lined
danger lurks in the depths (Score:2)
If you think putting too much CO_2 into the atmosphere is bad, just wait til you see what happens when we invert the oceans' thermocline.