The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy

[bilby]

Back on topic:

Why Solar and Wind Won't Make Much Difference to Carbon Dioxide Emissions

 

[bigfield]

In thirty years' time, when we've got a mix of solar, wind and gas and can't figure out how to replace the gas generators, people will still be saying that nuclear takes too long to build and costs too much.

We've locked ourselves into an energy policy that prevents us from building a clean grid. The best we can manage is "a bit less dirty".

We've forgone proven technology to gamble on storage technology that hasn't even been invented yet. But the only response anyone has to offer is "hey look solar's a bit cheaper now!" It's a load of bullshit.

 

[steve_bank]

I posted links on non fossil fuel energy growth going back a decade or so. The trend is up and increasing. You can always be a denier like the climate change deniers.

The post WWII conservative views of my generation will have to literally die off before any comprehensive policy can emerge.

It used to be designing DC-AC power supplies able to connect to the grid required a lot of experience to design and took a lot of components.

Among other s way back in the 90s Texas Instruments began making dedicated processors solei for DC-AC conversion for solar voltaics.

Other companies made ancillary chips for the rest of the design.

The semiconductor industry geared up for alternative energy way back in the 90s. Another indicator.

http://www.ti.com/solution/central-inverter

Scan the papers. This one is a good overview of the techniques.

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slaa602a/slaa602a.pdf

These days you can easily build a large scale solar plant using numbers of low cost inverters off the shelf operating in parallel. There is redundancy and hot swapping of inverters built into the design. Easy maintenance. The term that was coined is micro inviters. Multiple low power inverters in parallel.

Development began in the eraly 90s.
https://www.researchgate.net/public...inverters_applied_in_renewable_energy_systems


The mains switching and protective equipment and transformers are all off the shelf components.

150MW

https://www.power-technology.com/projects/mesquite-solar-1-power-plant-arizona/

Depending on location solar voltaic can compete with nuclear plant capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_stations

 

[lpetrich]

In thirty years' time, when we've got a mix of solar, wind and gas and can't figure out how to replace the gas generators, people will still be saying that nuclear takes too long to build and costs too much.

Thirty years? That's an awfully long time. With the vigorous development of storage technologies, I'm sure that we will get much-improved ones long before then.

Labor Party In New South Wales Promises 7 Gigawatts Of New Renewable Energy | CleanTechnica That's very good. Australia's states have continued forward with renewable-energy development, notably Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia, despite the national government's preference for coal.

EU Installs 8 Gigawatts Of Solar In 2018, Up 36% | CleanTechnica
Wind Provided 14% Of European Union's Electricity In 2018 | CleanTechnica

CleanTechnica has lots of coverage of wind, solar, storage, and electric cars, but it sometimes runs articles on other stuff, like desalination:

Humans Worth Their Salt? The Price Of Desalination = Brine Disposal | CleanTechnica -- brine = very salty water, because the salt must go somewhere.
As Israel's Freshwater Problems Grow, Plans To Double Down On Energy-Intensive Desalination Move Forward | CleanTechnica

From 2017:
Chasing the Solar Unicorn for Sustainable Water Desalination -- about concentrated solar power. I expected this technology to succeed, but I've been surprised to see how much better photovoltaic cells have been doing. The latest research effort there is in CSP desalination by distillation. That's the simplest way of desalinating seawater, but it is very energy-intensive. A common alternative is reverse osmosis, squeezing the water out of seawater.
Next Big Thing: Renewable Water Desalination | CleanTechnica

 

[bigfield]

In thirty years' time, when we've got a mix of solar, wind and gas and can't figure out how to replace the gas generators, people will still be saying that nuclear takes too long to build and costs too much.

Thirty years? That's an awfully long time. With the vigorous development of storage technologies, I'm sure that we will get much-improved ones long before then.

I agree. I am certain that storage technology will improve. But in thirty years we'll still be burning gas, because we don't just need to invent storage technology, we also need to make it cheap, and then we actually need to build it so we can take the polluters offline.

Invent the technology -> make it economical -> build it -> turn off the fossil fuel plants. It takes great optimism to believe that will all happen in time to avert the worst of climate change.

Meanwhile, we've got a sure thing in nuclear power that we could be building right now. We could have started decades ago. But instead we're inexplicably giving climate change a head start.

The post WWII conservative views of my generation will have to literally die off before any comprehensive policy can emerge.

The anti-nuclear lobby is spearheaded by the Green politics movement who are almost always progressives and socialists. They've done more than anyone to hobble our ability to reduce our emissions.

Conservatives in Australia have been among the loudest advocates for nuclear power. That doesn't make them the good guys--they've fought the adoption of solar, wind and batteries--but let's not pretend that old conservatives are the obstacle to emissions reductions.

 

[steve_bank]

The Navy developed a small reactor for propulsion. The nergy industry theought all they had to do was scale it up. Obviously they were short sighted.

There was a 50s-60s promo film prompting nukes. The kind of thing you would see in a movie theater before the movie. It claimed nuclear power would be so cheap it would not be metered. You would pay a flat monthly fee.

Tombe successful in the USA large scale nukes would require a common design that makes for lower costs in building and design.

I bleive the French have a common control room.

With our inbred ideology of free market for everything such a common strategy overseen by govt or national authority is impossible. Has the Yucca Flats nuclear dump site ever opened?

 

[lpetrich]

Activism! Listen To The Children: Political Miscalculations Pile Up Over The Green New Deal | CleanTechnica -- Sen. Mitch McConnell won't even talk to some high-school students, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein condescends:

“You know what’s interesting about this group? I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” Feinstein lectured. “I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that. I’ve gotten elected, I just ran, I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality,” she continued. “And I know what I’m doing. So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivers impassioned response to critics: 'I'm the boss. How about that?' | The Independent

“You know what? I don’t care anymore, because at least I’m trying and they’re not,” she said.

“I just introduced the Green New Deal two weeks ago and it’s creating all of this conversation, why? Because no one else has even tried.”

...
Critics have claimed the Green New Deal resolution is too extreme and unworkable, with Donald Trump incorrectly suggesting it would “permanently eliminate all planes, cars, cows, oil, gas and the military”.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez added: “So people are like ‘Oh it’s unrealistic, oh it’s vague, oh it doesn’t address this little minute thing’ and I’m like ‘You try! You do it!’ Because you’re not, so until you do it, I’m the boss, How about that?

Good challenge.

 

[lpetrich]

Queensland Breaks Ground On 1.5 Gigawatt Solar Farm With 500 MWh Battery Storage | CleanTechnica
Thus being 20 minutes of the panels' maximum output. That will be good for handling spikes in demand and smoothing out the effects of patchy clouds, even if not much else.

The Sunshine Energy project will be the largest in Australia — for now. There are other larger projects waiting in the wings for regulatory approval — a 4 GW renewable energy hub in New South Wales and the 11 GW Asian Renewable Energy Hub that will export power to Southeast Asia via undersea transmission lines. Australia likes to think it is energy independent because it has enough coal to power itself for 1,000 years. But the sun will be around a lot longer than that and it has one other significant advantage over coal — it’s free.

The problem with renewable energy has been initial cost -- higher than for fossil-fuel systems. But that has been getting lower and lower.

Just Ask Alaska: Yes, Diesel-Killing Solar Panels Work In The Cold | CleanTechnica -- a project under construction for an Alaskan village should reduce diesel-fuel consumption by about 25%.

It's All In The Chemistry For Lockheed Martin Energy | CleanTechnica

Lockheed Martin not only sees the opportunity to introduce new technology, but more importantly, the company knows how to introduce it. The approach it takes with the project is setting the right objectives for the startup team – low cost, working on the existing supply chains, and data driven. Lockheed believes it’s all in the chemistry and they are not satisfied with simply providing good battery performance. Trying to avoid what others often use — that is, nasty materials, toxins, acidic compounds, rare metals — they look at the periodic table and choose elements that are cheap and later custom designed on a molecular level to have the properties they want in a battery.

A commendable design philosophy.

 

[bilby]

Queensland Breaks Ground On 1.5 Gigawatt Solar Farm With 500 MWh Battery Storage | CleanTechnica
Thus being 20 minutes of the panels' maximum output. That will be good for handling spikes in demand and smoothing out the effects of patchy clouds, even if not much else.

The Sunshine Energy project will be the largest in Australia — for now. There are other larger projects waiting in the wings for regulatory approval — a 4 GW renewable energy hub in New South Wales and the 11 GW Asian Renewable Energy Hub that will export power to Southeast Asia via undersea transmission lines. Australia likes to think it is energy independent because it has enough coal to power itself for 1,000 years. But the sun will be around a lot longer than that and it has one other significant advantage over coal — it’s free.

The problem with renewable energy has been initial cost -- higher than for fossil-fuel systems. But that has been getting lower and lower.

Just Ask Alaska: Yes, Diesel-Killing Solar Panels Work In The Cold | CleanTechnica -- a project under construction for an Alaskan village should reduce diesel-fuel consumption by about 25%.

It's All In The Chemistry For Lockheed Martin Energy | CleanTechnica

Lockheed Martin not only sees the opportunity to introduce new technology, but more importantly, the company knows how to introduce it. The approach it takes with the project is setting the right objectives for the startup team – low cost, working on the existing supply chains, and data driven. Lockheed believes it’s all in the chemistry and they are not satisfied with simply providing good battery performance. Trying to avoid what others often use — that is, nasty materials, toxins, acidic compounds, rare metals — they look at the periodic table and choose elements that are cheap and later custom designed on a molecular level to have the properties they want in a battery.

A commendable design philosophy.

The sun may be free; But solar panels are neither cheap nor clean, and nor are these large batteries, which despite using vast resources and huge numbers of dollars, are several orders of magnitude from being big enough to solve the 'it gets dark at nighttime' problem that even afflicts solar panels in the tropics.

For the same amount of money and far less pollution, we could several times as much electricity supplied as reliable 24x7 power from uranium.

These big renewables and battery projects are a massive waste of time, money, effort, and resources, that benefit only the big gas companies. They are greenwashing - they let people feel like they are taking action, while achieving fuck all with regards to environmental benefits.

Germany has tried and failed. France has tried and succeeded. Why are people so keen to emulate the failure? It's insane - and it's driven by the gas industry's vested interests.

 

[lpetrich]

Green New Deal Forcing Democrats To Get Out Of Their Comfort Zone | CleanTechnica
Decentralized Renewable Energy–Focused European Super Grid Is Least Cost Option | CleanTechnica

US Renewable Energy Sources Surpass Nuclear In First Half Of 2018 | CleanTechnica though it includes hydroelectric
South Africa Drops Nuclear in Favor of Renewables | CleanTechnica

US Electricity Generation By Renewables Edges Out Nuclear (Interview) | CleanTechnica

4. Is it inevitable that nuclear power declines due mostly to its very high costs of new construction?

If the marketplace were truly rationale and competitive, nuclear power would have died on the vine decades ago — certainly following the TMI and then the Chernobyl accidents. Even with tax breaks, the Price-Anderson Act, low-balled costs for waste disposal & decommissioning, and lenient regulation, nuclear ceased being economically viable years ago — witness the saga of the effort to build four new reactors in recent years with two now cancelled and the other two-way over budget and behind schedule.

Non-Hydro Renewables To Replace Nuclear In Germany, Reaching 71.9% By 2030 | CleanTechnica
They are planning to phase out their nation's nuclear reactors by 2022 -- I find that a harebrained decision, and I say that as someone who does *not* consider nuclear energy the bee's knees. It would be better to keep existing ones going for as long as they are reasonably functional.

France Announces Cuts To Nuclear & Coal, Boost For Wind & Solar | CleanTechnica
They plan to phase out coal by 2022 and some of their older nuclear reactors by 2035. MUCH more sensible.

Wind & Solar In China Generating 2× Nuclear Today, Will Be 4× By 2030 | CleanTechnica

Why is China slowing its nuclear rollout so drastically? Because nuclear is turning out to be more expensive than expected, new nuclear designs are proving to be uneconomical, and new wind and solar are dirt cheap and much easier to build.

US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of Nuclear For Less Money | CleanTechnica

The coarse-grained benefits of nuclear seem good on paper. Nuclear produces about a tenth of the CO2 per MWH full lifecycle as coal and around a quarter of gas. That would probably see about 1.4 billion metric tons of saving per year when all the reactors were up and running. Sounds good, but…

It takes a median 15 years to build a single new nuclear plant per the global fleet’s stats ...

And nuclear is expensive. Unsubsidized, it’s $100 to $150 per MWH, or about 10–15 cents per KWH. That’s the wholesale price, not the retail price, so add a bunch for the retail price for consumers and businesses.

Utility scale solar is about the same CO2 as nuclear while wind is about half of either. If we split the difference and do a 50:50 mix of wind and solar instead, we’d see another 150 million tons of savings of CO2 per year.

And wind and solar are an awful lot faster to build than nuclear, with first power within two years, and full replacement possible in fifteen years. If we compare the savings over the 30 years, we would get triple the benefit with a saving of around 33 billion tons for wind and solar vs 11 billion tons for nuclear.

And wind and solar are a lot cheaper than nuclear. Right now unsubsidized onshore wind and solar are under $40 per MWH or 4 cents per KWH, and many places are already seeing $20 per MWH. So that’s 2.5 to 7.5 times cheaper than the nuclear.

That may be overstating the case by cherry-picking the numbers, but I would not be surprised if the overall conclusion is correct, that renewable sources are now cheaper than nuclear reactors. Renewables successfully compete with coal in some places, and I doubt that nuclear is much cheaper than coal.

 

[steve_bank]

The anti nuke lobby is not without foundation.

Large scale nukes done properly and safely would requ9ire over here a concerted design effort to make a standard maintainable reactor.

To build a plant today requires an investment group that thinks the cost of future lectricity will turn a profit in a reasonable amount of time. 3-5 years instead of 10 or 15.

On top of that their are only a very few companies that design nukes. It is not routine design work compared to natural gas. It is not a completive industry with volume that drives down costs.

I can go online and find steam turbines, boilers, and generators available. The control systems are standardized as is the instrumentation, no nuclear requirements. Add piping and natural gas.

The conservative energy lobby is strong and well funded and has a lot of political leverage via contributions.

Trump was more blatant about it in appointing energy execs in administration positions. Decentralized energy is a direct threat to the centralized energy industry.

Start putting solar electricity and solar hot water heating on homes across the south and demand for electricity goes down as well as price.

Coal is going the way of the horse and buggy. Coal interests are desperately trying to hang onto a disappearing market.

 

[lpetrich]

How A Tiny Offshore Wind Farm In Scotland Could Unseat A US President | CleanTechnica

File this one under P for Proof that karma is a bitch. The Trump* Organization’s ill-fated legal action against a relatively small, 11-turbine offshore wind farm in Scotland took yet another twist last week when the country’s Court of Sessions ruled that Trump’s company and the Trump International Golf Club in Aberdeen are on the hook for the country’s legal costs.

The exact sum has yet to be disclosed but it could amount to a tidy pile of Euros, considering that the lawsuit has festered since 2015.

tRump objected that that wind farm was an eyesore. At the recent CPAC, he stated about wind energy:

I think it’s really something that they should promote. They should work hard on it. … When the wind stops blowing that’s the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.

NREL Says Don't Recycle Single Use Plastics -- Upcycle! | CleanTechnica

The NREL researchers combined reclaimed PET with material derived from renewable sources such as waste plant biomass to create a new materials called fiber-reinforced plastics. FRPs have an economic value 2 to 3 times greater than the original PET. Not only that, the new products use 57% less energy than reclaiming PET using the current recycling process and emit 40% fewer greenhouse gases than FRPs derived from petroleum.

PET = polyethelene terephthalate, a common kind of plastic

Belgian Scientists Announce New Solar Panel That Makes Hydrogen | CleanTechnica

States Target Electric Car Owners With New Fees | CleanTechnica -- because they don't use gasoline, they are automatically exempt from gas taxes. So there will have to be some other way of financing the roads that they use.

 

[lpetrich]

This Is How Coal Ends: A Whimper, Not A Bang | CleanTechnica
Dubai Offers 900 Megawatts Of Solar In Latest Auction | CleanTechnica
Oslo Is (Almost) Car-Free -- And Likes It That Way | CleanTechnica
Are Self-Driving Cars Really Going to Replace All Human Drivers? | CleanTechnica -- not something that I would bet on any time soon. Full-scale automated driving would require being familiar with all the things that human drivers become familiar with, and that's a lot. Like road-maintenance workers using flags as signals, and tumbleweeds and plastic bags being harmless.

t’s also worth keeping in mind that self-driving cars are not an all-or-nothing proposition. Many vehicles come with driver assistance functions that help manual drivers without taking control from them. Lane departure warnings, braking warnings, anti-lock brakes, automatic emergency braking, lane keep assist, drowsiness detection, and many other features can increase safety. Also, part-time self-driving can help us all avoid driving when we aren’t safe drivers, such as when we are too tired, distracted or intoxicated to drive ourselves. The ease of turning such systems on and off can remove a lot of today’s temptation to drive when we shouldn’t while still enabling us to get there.

That seems like a plausible intermediate state, with human drivers coping with the likes of road-maintenance workers, tumbleweeds, and plastic bags.

US Utilities Buy More Renewables, But Coal Cloud Looms Ahead | CleanTechnica -- some more coal mines and other such projects in the works. But coal seems to be entering its twilight years, upstaged by natural gas and renewable sources.
Finland Approves 2029 Coal Ban For Energy Use | CleanTechnica

“Already, most EU member states have banned new coal power plants,” explained Gerard Wynn, an Energy Finance Consultant with the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis (IEEFA) who spoke to me via email. “By approving a coal phaseout plan, Finland joins 10 other EU countries planning to eliminate existing coal power plants as well. France and Sweden lead coal phaseout plans in 2022, followed by Austria, Ireland, Italy, and Britain in 2025, and then Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Portugal. Besides government-led coal phaseout plans, coal utilities face other headwinds including the falling cost of renewables and rising carbon prices, as well as pressure from investors, creditors and insurers. That could see coal come off the grid much sooner than expected in other countries, for example in Germany which recently agreed a phaseout by 2038 at the latest.”

Just Ask Washington: Yes, Coal-Killing Solar Panels Work In Rainy Weather | CleanTechnica I have become very familiar with Pacific-Northwest climate. It's very sunny in summer, and very cloudy and rainy in the fall, winter, and spring. Not as good as (say) southern California, but still fairly good, since its clearest weather is when it gets the most sunlight.

 

[lpetrich]

Global Solar Installations Reached 104 Gigawatts In 2018 | CleanTechnica -- apparently installations per year. It's remarkable how far it has come. A nice thing about solar panels is how accessible they are. Small installations are as efficient as big ones. So one does not have to buy a gigawatt of capacity when one only wants a kilowatt. Wind energy can also scale down, even if not as well. I've found these small wind turbines:

Breezergy Micro Wind Turbine
Micro Wind Turbine — NILS FERBER - a portable one that can charge a cellphone

Has anyone ever heard of a home-sized nuclear reactor? Even fossil fuels scale down much better.

Global Wind Energy Council & World Bank To Cooperate On New Offshore Wind Development | CleanTechnica
Trump Escalates War On Renewables, Slashes DOE Budget By 70% | CleanTechnica

UK in deal to unlock offshore wind boom and green jobs - Renewable Energy World

Offshore wind is set to provide more than 30 per cent of UK electricity by 2030 after the government today launched a landmark deal with the renewables industry.

...
The deal will see £250m provided to UK companies working in offshore wind technologies such as robotics, advanced manufacturing, floating wind and larger turbines

 

[bilby]

Global Solar Installations Reached 104 Gigawatts In 2018 | CleanTechnica -- apparently installations per year. It's remarkable how far it has come. A nice thing about solar panels is how accessible they are. Small installations are as efficient as big ones. So one does not have to buy a gigawatt of capacity when one only wants a kilowatt. Wind energy can also scale down, even if not as well. I've found these small wind turbines:

Breezergy Micro Wind Turbine
Micro Wind Turbine — NILS FERBER - a portable one that can charge a cellphone

Has anyone ever heard of a home-sized nuclear reactor?

They are called RTGs, and the Soviets were using them for heating and power in remote arctic areas in the 1950s. They also power a variety of space probes, including the Apollo Lunar Excursion Modules, and the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Small Modular Reactors the size of a shipping container that run completely unattended for several decades are also currently on the drawing boards. No batteries required.

Even fossil fuels scale down much better.

Global Wind Energy Council & World Bank To Cooperate On New Offshore Wind Development | CleanTechnica
Trump Escalates War On Renewables, Slashes DOE Budget By 70% | CleanTechnica

UK in deal to unlock offshore wind boom and green jobs - Renewable Energy World

Offshore wind is set to provide more than 30 per cent of UK electricity by 2030 after the government today launched a landmark deal with the renewables industry.

...
The deal will see £250m provided to UK companies working in offshore wind technologies such as robotics, advanced manufacturing, floating wind and larger turbines

Woo fucking Hoo. More battery chargers for the batteries that don't exist.

 

[lpetrich]

They are called RTGs, and the Soviets were using them for heating and power in remote arctic areas in the 1950s. They also power a variety of space probes, including the Apollo Lunar Excursion Modules, and the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Except that RTG "fuel" is rather difficult to make. NASA has trouble getting enough for upcoming interplanetary missions. Their power output slowly declines, but it is effectively constant on shorter timescales, so it cannot be throttled. it's like how nuclear reactors are commonly run, but worse. So a home RTG would either have to be overbuilt or else supplemented with batteries. Much like nuclear reactors and renewable sources.

Small Modular Reactors the size of a shipping container that run completely unattended for several decades are also currently on the drawing boards. No batteries required.

I'll believe it when I see it. If it isn't preempted by renewable sources and improved storage.

 

[bilby]

They are called RTGs, and the Soviets were using them for heating and power in remote arctic areas in the 1950s. They also power a variety of space probes, including the Apollo Lunar Excursion Modules, and the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Except that RTG "fuel" is rather difficult to make. NASA has trouble getting enough for upcoming interplanetary missions. Their power output slowly declines, but it is effectively constant on shorter timescales, so it cannot be throttled. it's like how nuclear reactors are commonly run, but worse. So a home RTG would either have to be overbuilt or else supplemented with batteries. Much like nuclear reactors and renewable sources.

'Rather difficult to make' is a very, very low hurdle, compared to the problem of sufficient storage to make intermittent renewables viable. To dismiss an exitant technology that has been in use for decades as 'rather difficult', while airily hand waving into existence batteries that have six orders of magnitude more capacity per unit price than anything we have ever made is an astonishing double standard.

Small Modular Reactors the size of a shipping container that run completely unattended for several decades are also currently on the drawing boards. No batteries required.

I'll believe it when I see it. If it isn't preempted by renewable sources and improved storage.

It's always better to have it but not need it, than to need it but not have it.

A power source that can't be throttled can just be connected to a sink of some kind. Either you can throw away the energy you don't need, or use it for some purpose that's not time critical, like desalination of seawater.

This is NOT a similar problem to that of an intermittent power source, which requires some kind of backup to fill the holes where you need power that you don't have.

It's the difference between saving money when you get an unexpected bonus at work that exceeds your normal household budget (you can save the money, but if savings accounts haven't been invented, you can give it away to charity, or at worst just throw it in the bin); and saving money so that you don't starve during long and unpredictable periods of unemployment - if savings accounts are not available, then you are totally fucked.

Seriously, you need to start critically examining what cleantechnica publish - these guys have never once let facts get in the way of their preferred narrative, and their relentless cheerleading without reference to reality is beginning to rot your brain.

The French already showed us that nuclear plus hydro is an effective way to produce power that matches demand, without CO₂ emissions.

The Germans have spent more time, and more money, than France ever did, trying to demonstrate the same thing can be done with wind and solar. They have completely failed.

To pretend that this abject failure is unimportant, and that the same strategy will one day work if only we throw vastly more money at it, is to misunderstand what constitutes success.

If Germany did finally, one day, achieve French emissions levels without regular power outages, after having spent vastly more to achieve the exact same outcomes, then that would STILL be a clear indication that the French strategy was FAR superior.

The game is over. French strategy beats German, when trying to provide on demand and affordable electricity to an industrialised nation without contributing to climate change.

The only remaining question is 'when are people going to stop navel gazing and accept the observable facts?'. I shalln't be holding my breath.

 

[steve_bank]

It was a while back. Sandia Labs and a commercial company were working on small portable generators. Encased in concrte, not refuelable, and no need for water cooling. Intend for community level power. Small enough to be delivered on a flatbed truck.

The idea was mass produce a small simple system and reduce cost. Not a bad idea.

That idea is the same threat solar and wind represents to utilities and coal.

Decentralized power takes away a monopoly of the few power providers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A power source that can't be throttled can just be connected to a sink of some kind. Either you can throw away the energy you don't need, or use it for some purpose that's not time critical, like desalination of seawater.

Yeah. Most places in the world have a water shortage problem. Kill two birds with one stone, run the desalinators on the power the grid doesn't need. Or do a variation on pumped-hydro: When the grid doesn't need the power you pump the water high enough to provide the pressure the desalinators need. They actually run on the water coming down from the elevated location and thus can run all the time.

This sort of approach also means the grid is much more tolerant of intermittent sources of power being added.

 

[lpetrich]

Project Sunroof Enter one's home address and it will do a Google Maps display of your home, complete with its roof being colored to indicate how much sunlight it gets: black to brown to orange to yellow. It will also make an estimate on how much you are likely to save with solar panels on your roof.

I checked it out for places where I currently live, recently lived, and lived in the past. Central and southeastern Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and northern California are good places for rooftop solar panels, but western Oregon isn't.