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The Forum > Article Comments > Hasten slowly into renewable energy > Comments

Hasten slowly into renewable energy : Comments

By Martin Nicholson, published 26/6/2009

The improvement to renewable energy technology continues: the longer the transition takes, the better the outcome.

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You might be right Stormbay, but in most locations you cannot get a clean
airflow because of adjoining buildings trees etc etc.
As for putting it up high enough you should see the pantomime of
problems I had with a couple of radio antennas.
As for removing some one hundred plus foot trees well the council
would either collapse in laughter or have a stroke.

My weather stations shows very low levels of wind speed almost all
the time. It seldom gets over five to eight knots.
The anemometer is at 11 metres height and fairly close to the house.
At present it is showing a dead calm. There will probably be no wind for
another hour or so.
Posted by Bazz, Wednesday, 1 July 2009 8:25:16 AM
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STORAGE:
Why does all the energy have to be stored in one place? It’s simply wrong to suggest this is some sort of technical requirement. Hundreds of solar thermal plants using the new super-efficient Solar Graphite technology (invented here in Australia) might prove MORE reliable because power can be dispersed more locally across the nation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Heat_storage

http://www.lloydenergy.com/heatstorage.htm

These graphite blocks can be connected to a wind turbine as they are on King Island, and store excess wind energy as heat.
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/lloyd-energy-systems-graphite-block-storage

PRICE
There is no technical reason we cannot run a renewable grid 24 hours a day. The only issue to overcome is price. For some reason it is OK to give $10 billion in subsidies to oil, gas, and coal annually across Australia, yet it’s outrageous to consider upgrading a HVDC transmission line to our red-center for geothermal energy, or pay a subsidy for storage? D’uh! Consider all the storage options: hydrogen, chemical, compressed air, hot liquid salt (solar thermal), and even electric cars can sell power back to the grid, earning their owners a premium.

MINIMIZING STORAGE NEEDS
But the best factor is that all the renewables complement and back each other up anyway. I’d be really surprised if storage was ever required at high levels. We could hypothetically run Australia off our geothermal energy ALONE as reliable baseload power. Then there’s the fact that wind, spread over a large enough area, approaches baseload. Add Solar thermal, wave, micro-hydro, biomass, algae, and you’ve pretty much already GOT a baseload grid.

But we should have done this yesterday. Peak oil is here, peak gas next, peak coal by 2025 to 2040’s? It’s time to get off the fossil fuels now, not just for global warming but our energy and National security!
Posted by Eclipse Now, Tuesday, 7 July 2009 8:42:35 PM
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Stormbay,
Your claim that we can have wind generators on every house
just does not stand up.
We had a windy day here recently and wind gusts were up to 17 knots.
However my wx station showed that the average speed for the day was 4 knots.
At the moment and most days wind speed will vary between zero and
3 or 4 knots.
The location here is at 600ft asl with good exposure to east south and north.
West and SW is sheltered by large trees.
The anemometer is about 3 metres above house ridge level.
It is illegal to have anything more than 1 1/2 metres above ridge
level. I have already had an argument with the council about this
and only won because it had been there so long.

Eclipse Now;
You are right about geothermal energy, Geodynamics have had good
steam flow even though they have run into control problems.
I am sure the will overcome those problems.

Wind is a different however, you can get large highs that
cover the whole country and to do as you suggest we would have to have
every area equipped and able to support the whole country and even
then you could not guarantee service.

Storage, now there is a hope there but to store enough to run the
country for a day, well once it is developed we may not be able to
afford it.

Every building with lifts would have to be equipped with enough
storage to run the lifts until the building was emptied.
Every hospital would need enough storage be it diesel or battery etc
to keep it going, including its lifts.

It is not as simple as you have assumed by saying that renewables can
do the job.
Of course if geothermal can be cranked up quickly enough then we
are home and hosed.
Posted by Bazz, Wednesday, 8 July 2009 11:15:05 AM
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OK but on wind, the larger the grid area, the closer wind *approaches* baseload. I'm NOT saying we should experimentally try putting all our eggs in one basket.

Have you seen this ABC news report on CETO 24 hour baseload wave power?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V27ZBODcv0c

Geothermal, solar thermal, wave power... pretty much baseload already. THEN add wind (for the super-high ERoEI) and you have some extra energy that, being fungible, might help in the manufacture of the other energy systems, "topping up" and compensating for lower ERoEI's in other energy fields. EG: IF solar PV only has a payback after 2 or 3 years, and wind has a payback of around 3 to 6 months, why can't wind help manufacture solar? The solar factory doesn't care. The machines just want electrons, they don't care if the electricity comes from a mix of biomass, wave, solar, or even coal for that matter. (YUK!)

We might make mistakes as we do this. America suffered a terrible blackout a few years back but civilisation didn't come to an end. It hurt the economy for sure. But the people that RANT against having "too high a wind spread" act as if civilisation itself will come tumbling down if there's a blackout or 2. I think we can do this given the 3 main baseloads we have in such ample supply above (CETO wave, geothermal, and solar thermal) but we'll learn as we go.

How much power does Iraq have each day? ;-) "Oh no, wind power is intermittent, we've GOT to be careful!" Or what.... we might have a blackout for a few hours until the system picks up again? But as I said, I think we can do this with each energy mix doing it's bit. Wind might only make up 30% or 40% of the final energy mix, I don't know. But we can do it.

People need to read a bit more about energy grids and what happens when a 2000 megawatt coal plant goes offline for servicing. How does civilisation survive? ;-) Ummm, surplus power from other areas. We can do this.
Posted by Eclipse Now, Wednesday, 8 July 2009 11:26:31 AM
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