Greig says, in respect to the claim of generation of 60 Kw of electricity 365 days per year from a pond one third of a hectare in area by the Pyramid Hill solar pond:

"Incorrect. The plants produces 60kW OF HEAT on average. It does not produce electricity. If it was converted to electricity, then heat and Carnot efficiency losses would reduce the output to around 20kW. Amortisation of the generator capital costs plus O&M on the generators would increase the price of power to around 7-8 cents/kWh … not bad only 40% more expensive than what you pay now for grid electricity."

It would seem Greig and I must be reading from different pages.

This one: http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:C0w_Jx4fpewJ:www.enersalt.com.au/Local%2520Publish/assets/integr%2520system%2520dryland%2520f%2520Article%25202003.pdf+organic+rankine+cycle+engine&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=59&gl=au says, on its page 2, under the heading 'Energy Production' the following:

"An Israeli Company (Ormat) operated an experimental 5 MW solar heat gradient pond from 1983 to 1990 near the Dead Sea. The ponds covered 250,000m2 and operated a 5 MW turbine, which equates to around 50m2 per kW generating capacity."

and, further down,

"A typical salt-gradient solar pond can absorb around 10 kWh/m2/day and a 1-hectare (10,000m2) solar pond can absorb around 100,000 kWh of thermal energy per day. Conversion efficiencies of around 10% would realise 1.75 million kilowatt hours annually."

This claimed Israeli experience corroborates the 1 Mw per 5.5 Ha of pondage derived from the Pyramid Salt experience. The Israeli ponds actually generated electricity at the rate I had claimed for the Pyramid Hill pond.

Greig's costing for the seemingly incorrectly reduced electric power output of the Pyramid Hill pond of 7-8 cents per KwH applied to the Ormat experience indicates a cost of 2.7 cents per KwH.

An important disparity.

Forrest,

Do not take too much notice of Greig. He is unwilling to listen or consider other points of view and he is so certain of his opinion that he cannot see that there are alternatives. My advice is to ignore him.

If you take away artificial financial costs imposed on projects by the bizarre way we have organised our money system then solar ponds will produce energy that can compete with other energy sources. Maybe in a area such as the production of liquid fuels - maybe in the area of accelerated growth of marine organisms - who knows until we try it. Maybe it will prove unviable for reasons we have not thought about. All that is irrelevant. The important thing is we try these things out in a serious way and we experiment with such initiatives.

To give some inspiration to those of us battling the "Masters of the Universe" mentality please visit http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

and see how something real and productive has been done without the help of spreadsheet jockeys pouring over their paper models and done by a person who only wished to save orangutans

Hi Forrest, I think I understand where the disparity lies. You are correct in saying that the Pyramid Hill and Ormat facilities provide similar power outputs per unit area. However whilst the Ormat facilty generates electricity, it does not mention the price of the electricity, ie there is no reference to Ormat producing electricity at 2.7c/KWh. Rather, the price of HEAT produced at Pyramid Hill is 2.7c/kWh. You are confusing the price to produce heat with the price to produce electricity. The latter is much more expensive because you must add the substantial cost of generators, O&M and transmission systems, not to mention backup generation.

A detailed and fully referenced discussion of the solar electricity generation costs may be found at http://web.bgu.ac.il/NR/rdonlyres/D37B2231-A023-47E4-A96D-D6ABA2F374C4/35393/costsolarelectricity.pdf which concludes with a cost of 9.3 c/kWh for solar pond electricity, as fully optimized supplemental but excluding the substantial costs of transmission and backup generation. Current price for electricity (as delivered) using current technology is:

Solar pond: 34c/kWh
Solar PV: 53c/kWh
Solar thermal: 18c/kWh

When you consider CCGT and nuclear electricity is priced at 5-7c/kWh (delivered) and unlike solar power is reliable and scalable to large-scale deployment, it would seem solar power is just not in the same league in delivering cost effective low emissions electricity.

Fickle Pickle has not produced referenced material to justify any the myriad of incredible claims about the financing of renewable energy generation, and does not seem to understand anything about how capital intensive projects are financed. I admire the optimism, but suspect that Fickle Pickle boasts an economics degree that was cut from the back of a cereal packet.

Finally, Willie Smits is talking about a reforestation program. Though a remarkable and worthy effort, the issue is a bit different to the problem of providing reliable energy for a first world industrialized economy.

One of the problems we have with economists like Greig is that they have been brought up believing that the way we organise our monetary and debt system is the way it has to be.

Just to point out a few of the problems.

We have a liquidity crisis brought on by the creation of too much debt that as a byproduct created too much money. We are now trying to solve the problem by creating more debt which brought us to the crisis.

We have a system that measures wealth by consumption. Under this scheme if I buy a packet of cigarettes I contribute as much to wealth as if invested the money in a way to produce renewable energy.

We have a system where the people who already have money are the ones who get access to more while those who have ways of creating more money have difficulty getting access.

We have a system of markets - like the share market - which is unpredictable and its behaviour cannot be understood.

We have a system that says that money markets - which are also unpredictable - are a sensible way to allocate resources. Because the behaviour of markets are essentially random they cannot be used for sensible allocation. You may as well use a casino.

It is time we examined markets and made them work. As an idea for allocation of resources they make sense - but only if they work as expected. That is they reach stable equilibrium where price acts as the governor in matching supply and demand.

Going on with the same old systems will not fix things. If Greig could take a little time to try to understand what I am saying he might see that there are alternatives. The key ideas I am promoting that will lead to stable monetary markets and sensible investments that will produce cheap renewable energy as a by product are

1. Do not lend money before you have it on deposit. (Get rid of fractional reserve banking)

2. Create new money by first creating an asset

Fickle Pickle,

I have to disagree with you: I think we all should take a lot of notice of what Greig is saying and doing. He is posting most tenaciously in this forum, and that demands respect. So too do your qualifications to post on OLO, which OLO viewers may see here in summary: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=2741 . (For those who may not know, OLO userID 'Fickle Pickle' is OLO author Kevin Cox.)

I have rechecked the Enersalt website, and Greig is correct in saying, with respect to the Pyramid Hill solar pond, that the 60Kw 24/7 is for heat, with electrical output (was electricity conversion to have been undertaken there) being projected as being 25 Kwe 24/7. This link: http://www.enersalt.com.au/Local%20Publish/html/cost___value.html states "A small pond like [the Pyramid Hill pond] will run a 25kWe generator."

The contention as to how much electricity COULD be supplied 24/7 from the Pyramid Hill pond is still unresolved. That is because the Israeli ponds actually generated electricity at the rate per Ha of pond area that I had, albeit incorrectly, claimed for the Pyramid Hill pond. I imagine that might be because Ormat, the recognised world leader in ORC energy conversion equipment, operated those Dead Sea ponds.

That most important disparity between the projected costs of 2.7 cents/KwH and 7-8 cents/Kwh, ex 'power station', for electricity from solar ponds and HDR geothermal respectively, may well remain despite what Greig has said in his post of Friday, 6 March 2009 7:27:31 AM.

In the context of efficiency of power conversion from solar pond heat, this link may prove interesting: http://www.katrix.com.au/news-events_detail.aspx?view=8 It says of the Katrix high efficiency fluid motor/expander:

"This core component of a solar thermal microCHP system, will become an enabler of such systems with power outputs of 1 – 10kW, with expected efficiencies greater than PV systems at a significantly reduced capital cost per kW."

Forrest Gump,

I am not arguing about the amount of electricity produced. I am arguing about the way the financial returns are calculated. The problem with most financiers is that the model they use is based on present value methods (PVM) for calculating returns on investment. Most people use this approach and it has distorted investment decisions. Your solar ponds will never be developed even though they may return 10 times their cost over their lifetime of say 30 years. PMV is not a good way of deciding between long term investments such as renewables versus fossil fuel burning systems.

There are other ways of calculating returns on investments than those that favour the short term.

Most of the costs in renewable energy are capital costs. These are interest costs, repayment costs, risk of capital costs, profits and taxes. For long term assets an alternative way to calculate returns is through life time income from the use of the assets minus the direct costs of producing the income and minus the cost to build the asset.

The way we do our investment calculations determines where we invest our money. If you used present value methods to calculate returns you would rarely invest in anything where most of the returns come after 10 years. For example you are unlikely to invest in early childhood education.

It means innovation is stifled because when you have a ground breaking innovative technology in the labs it takes at least 10 years under the current financial system before you see it in the shops - mainly because it is so difficult to get funding for long term projects. It is the reason why things are built to throw away when they break rather than repair them because the returns are well into the future. When we add to this the bizarre accounting practice of measuring our wealth by how much we consume rather than by how much wealth producing assets we own then we biase towards the short term in our investment decisions.