I loved that song when it first came out FG then again I was pretty stoned every time I heard it.
Like that comment from Peter the Believer, it reminds me why I am not a believer.

What a great idea if it works.

I have always thought we would be better to find a solution for carbon storeage, rather than to cripple our nation financially.

Fingers crossed!

One of the reasons I started this thread is because I once was motivated to look into gainfully using the enormous amount of waste heat from coal-fired electricity generation. This happened on an old OLO article comments thread, 'What's a bone-dry city worth?' (see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5616#75523 and scroll around a bit), one posted by OLO contributor Peter Ravenscroft on 16 March 2007. The article's OLO by-line was "Water management in South East Queensland? It's enough to make a cane toad weep."

In the context of the then acute SE Queensland drought, I did some elementary calculations as to how waste heat from the existing coal-fired power stations could be applied to desalinating seawater. It appeared that waste heat alone could desalinate water equivalent to 75% of Brisbane's normal demand. This was dramatic enough, but a by-product of that projected desalination held out even more intriguing promise.

The near-saturated brine by-product, if stored in ponds, could be used as a medium for very cost-effective capture of solar energy utilizing the temperature inversion phenomenon. The thing was, it appeared as if this brine would accumulate such that if it was all utilized in solar pondage it would only take from seven to 13 years for the pondage to be collecting as much energy from the sun as the coal-fired electricity output of the power stations!

Here was a pathway for dismounting from the evil, sky blackening, GHG producing old king coal! And it could solve a water shortage problem in the process.

It seems to me that the integration of oil algae culture into a waste heat utilization project itself leading into large scale solar pondage would make an enormous amount of sense in an Australian context. We generate 80% of our electricity from coal, of which we have enormous amounts. We are heavily dependent upon imported liquid petroleum fuels in a supply scenario with respect to oil as we know it having reached peak availability.

What are we to do?

G'Day All,
Foxy the idea of a giant solar panel in the desert is something that I cannot see has not raised its head in all this "power talk" it's all this clean coal or nuclear.
Why not a giant solar panel we have the technology we have enough unemployed & we have the skills.
Further why not solar panelled street lights the same as those garden lights or whatever.
With this we could have a set up the way that Forest says as a back up supply of power.
The whole point is it needs something done now instead of the ones that can make things happen sitting around getting paid to do nothing.
Have a good life from Dave

An article 'Big Oil turns to algae' in Technology Review (see: http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23039/page2/ ) contains the seemingly daunting information that:

"A study in 2004 at the University of New Hampshire concluded that 30 million acres--a space the size of South Carolina--would be required to grow enough algae to satisfy U.S. transportation needs."

In Australia, with perhaps less than one tenth the requirement for transportation fuels as the US, this may not be so daunting. Three million acres is equivalent to 4688 square miles, or 12,141 square kilometres. The area of Lake Torrens, for example, is 5,700 square kilometres. Lake Gairdner is around 11,000 square kilometres in area. There are many smaller salt pan lakes in Australia.

So should it be that in Australia it became necessary to substitute algal oil for all conventionally derived oil presently used in transportation, the availability of potentially suitable land area with good insolation would seem not to be an insurmountable problem.

When, in conjunction with the sort of pondage required for oil algae culture, it is considered that solar pondage, based upon actual trials, requires around six hectares of pond surface per megawatt of 24/7 base load generating capacity, the synergistic possibilities for renewables-based liquid fuels and electricity generation seem quite encouraging. Thus, to substitute the 1,400 Mw coal-fired output that the Tarong power station is capable of, would require around 7,800 Ha of pondage. ( http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2103#52294 ) That is hectares, not square kilometres; a unit 100 times smaller than the square kilometres in which we have been talking.

Now it might be objected that suitable dry salt lakes are not necessarily adjacent to where we presently burn coal. Don't you worry about that. There are things called pipes, through which the carbon-enriched seawater, used in what amounts to the sequestration of carbon dioxide at the power station, can be pumped to suitable algal, and solar, pond sites.

Big project? Yes, but requiring only fairly conventional low and non-proprietary technology, of the sort Australia has, or can get.

dwg,

A major reason photo-voltaic solar panels are not more widely used is that they are not yet cost-effective. There was an article 'Installing solar PV panels - the figures don’t add up, BUT… ' ( for comments see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8569&page=0 ), but the upshot of that was that while individual householders could buy their own panels they were still not independent of the grid if they did so. The feed-in tariffs proposed to encourage installation of more PV panels are not much more than a money pipeline from all electricity consumers to an overseas manufacturer and a handful of local installation and maintenance contractors. Australia can do better than that.

Successful testing of a 20Kw Katrix® 'Decebal' motor, a new class of high efficiency fluid motor having an isentropic efficiency of greater than 42%, and developed with the assistance of a Renewable Energy Development Incentive (REDI) grant, was announced on 1 February 2006. These motors are seen as becoming a core component of small-scale residential and commercial solar thermal combined heat and power systems. See: http://www.katrix.com.au/default.aspx

I should imagine that devices like the Katrix motor would be able to be integrated into the conversion of solar thermal powered wood pyrolysis waste heat into electricity, something that is potentially achievable at residential scale for free-standing buildings on or off the grid, of which there are many in Australia. The integration of small-scale CHP systems with wood pyrolysis potentially creates a means of overcoming the intermittency of solar thermal energy. The wood gas produced can be burned when the sun is not shining. The whole process is GHG neutral. The charcoal produced, whilst it could be burned, is probably of more use in sequestering carbon and overcoming 'peak soil'.

It is now late 2009. I wonder has the Katrix 'Decebal' gone the way of the Sarich orbital engine? What protection against 'patent trolling' exists for the results of taxpayer assisted developments of this nature, I wonder?

But I digress, don't I?