Comments on: ELF09: energy, sustainability, and more

By: Jeff Kohut

Jeff Kohut — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:36:46 +0000

With respect to world financial crisis and the fact that regulations are still in place which permitted the crisis to happen: I think developed countries must differentiate between risky and safe investments and then limit risky investments to those made directly by a fund or individual and excluding retirement funds such as pensions. If an individual wants risky investment they should be required to get ouside the safer confines of group retirement plans. Financial institutions participating in risky investments should not be allowed to participate in pensions and other retirement funds. If retirement money dries up to risky practices, then many businesses will quit participating in risky ventures such as hedge funds and derivatives!

By: David Wood

David Wood — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:58:41 +0000

Hi Dave, I'm no expert (yet...) but I believe you're right that there are plenty of options for solving the storage issues. That's the message I take away from chapter 26 "Fluctuations and storage" in David MacKay's book, "Sustainable energy without the hot air". To quote from pages 195-196: Let’s recap our options. We can balance fluctuating demand and fluctuating supply by switching on and off power generators (waste incinerators and hydroelectric stations, for example); by storing energy somewhere and regenerating it when it’s needed; or by switching demand off and on. The most promising of these options, in terms of scale, is switching on and off the power demand of electric-vehicle charging. 30 million cars, with 40 kWh of associated batteries each (some of which might be ex-changeable batteries sitting in filling stations) adds up to 1200 GWh. If freight delivery were electrified too then the total storage capacity would be bigger still. There is thus a beautiful match between wind power and electric vehicles. If we ramp up electric vehicles at the same time as ramping up wind power, roughly 3000 new vehicles for every 3 MW wind turbine, and if we ensure that the charging systems for the vehicles are smart, this synergy would go a long way to solving the problem of wind fluctuations. If my prediction about hydrogen vehicles is wrong, and hydrogen vehicles turn out to be the low-energy vehicles of the future, then the wind-with-electric-vehicles match-up that I’ve just described could of course be replaced by a wind-with-hydrogen match-up. The wind turbines would make electricity; and whenever electricity was plentiful, hydrogen would be produced and stored in tanks, for subsequent use in vehicles or in other applications, such as glass production... There are a few other demand-management and energy-storage options, which we’ll survey now...

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:43:15 +0000

It is NOT the installed base, nor the money required thats the real problem. It is the governments of the world. While spouting hotair about going green they continue to reap most of their tax revenue from fossil fuels, they are unable to give that up, wean themselves off it, so spend a lot of effort making damned sure that any other ideas are crushed – either with planning permission, deliberate exclusion from finance or legislation.
Electricity is not a difficult energy to store – large scale batteries are, but for large scale storage this is not how its done, I have seen 30 or more years ago ‘stored hydro’ schemes, when there is too much power from wind or solar pump some water up into a lake, when the windor solar is not enough use the hydro to generate.