YOU: Fix the US Energy Crisis

[mfb]

It is a list of villages destroyed to make space for coal mining, every bullet point is a village that disappeared. Typically 200-1000 inhabitants per bullet point. The rest of the text is not relevant.

 

[Andy SV]

Maybe not but I read voraciously and I have German heritage so I was hoping to learn something

 

[Ken Fabos]

Apologies but I am not going through 71 pages of comments before adding my own; there may be points already made. Note also that I am not from USA and may well be missing US specific knowledge, but the essential problems are shared widely around the world.

I have some serious concerns about nuclear but I don't have ideological objections, yet I think it's not going to help us much so long as the mire of conflicted climate and energy politics continues; without deep, enduring commitment to the fundamental goal of transition to low emissions it will lack the deep, committed support of a large part of mainstream politics. Politics and economics will constrain nuclear rather than enable it because, ironically much of the support for nuclear is within the part of the political spectrum with a currently higher priority of opposing strong climate action and protecting the long term economic viability of fossil fuels; under such circumstances the influence of opponents of nuclear will appear much larger and overwhelming than otherwise. In addition the political expedient used by opponents of climate responsibility to frame the climate and energy problem as fringe and green - in order to taint real scientific advice in the public mind with associations with radical and irrational political nuttery has tended to deal the Conservative aligned nuclear-for-climate advocates out of the policy development game. Early renewables programs were almost certainly done as appeasement of the growning "green" community concern, probably with a cynical expectation they would fail so thoroughly that solar and wind - favoured by those most vocal in pushing the climate issue (because so many others were being silent) - would be discredited.

As long as the Republican party in the US (or Liberal National Party in Australia ) engage in Doubt, Deny, Delay politics on climate much of the political support for nuclear will not be able to be put to use effectively and nuclear's potential will remain on hold. More than any other option nuclear requires long term, enduring political commitment to The Transition, as the initial investments are too large for any incremental growth path.

Meanwhile renewable energy, whilst greatly impacted in both directions by government policy, is becoming economically viable in it's own right and can get enough support, despite the obstructionist politicking, to continue to be used in ever greater amounts. Past costs and rates of use are poor guides to future uptake; crucial price thresholds for energy production have been and are being passed and dealing with intermittency rather than production itself has become the issue of most significance. That will create it's own market impacts, such as abundant daytime solar energy forcing fixed plant - hydro, coal, gas, nuclear - into intermittency in response. (Note that this could be very different in US to here in Australia where there is a wholesale National Energy Market, with producers bidding to provide suppy in 30 minute blocks/soon to be 5 minute blocks, according to demand). When renewables are abundant wholesale prices go low and the daytime peak demand in sunny Australia, that previously forced prices high, has seen the most profitable period shaved from the FF business model.

Even a relatively small amount of storage can shave the prices off the evening peak and during sunny weather will see backup plant that would come online each afternoon being left idle for days at a time. It can be seen as a damaging disruption to the energy network, with regulations put in place to ensure the economic viability of FF producers or it can be used intelligently as a de-facto carbon price to drive investment in solutions to intermittency; I would prefer to see the latter. It will be those inflated peak prices that storage will compete for, not any average daily price. Hydro is well placed in that circumstance, being able to preferentially service the high priced peaks - it doesn't even have to be pumped storage to function as backup to renewables. Nuclear would need market interventions that reward their low emissions or else they too will face being forced to sit idle or sell below cost (possibly anti-competitive and illegal) every sunny day and need to recoup costs outside that period or insulate their production from the free market. Which would take policy making with forethought and planning - something still lacking, at least around here.

There is some element of jumping blind in a full commitment to a transition to renewable energy - although that will be true of any course we take. We will be deploying ever greater amounts of solar and wind before the solutions to intermittency are in place and requirea some faith that solutions can be achieved along the way to fully commit to it. There is a lot of room for R&D to deliver significant results, with some significant goals worth chasing - including improved energy storage, better distribution, efficiencies and demand management. I'm not convinced we can delay the continuing deployment of RE with any expectation it would lead to deployment of nuclear; in the current political mire such delay will only benefit fossil fuels.

 

[mheslep]

...and no Western reactor has the design that made the Chernobyl accident possible.

No power reactor anywhere has the flaws that made Chernobyl possible (e.g. strong positive void coefficient). The few remaining RBMKs have been heavily modified.

 

[mheslep]

Not with a fully functional system. Writing publications based on simulations is great, testing things in the lab is better, but the final system will never look as simple as the initial designs.

Backing up a bit ...

A functional 7.5 MWt MSR was run, 17K critical hours, at Oak Ridge decades ago. Fluorine salt. Many of the issues you raise were indeed challenges, including free flourine, though largely resolved and documented.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...ion/molten-salt-reactors.aspx#ECSArticleLink0
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
Uranium only. They often let the salt freeze on the weekends and sent everyone home. An ongoing purge of gas fission products rendered the remaining salt considerably safer in shutdown relative to solid fuels.

 

[mfb]

7.5 MWt to a functional power plant is about the power ratio of a bike to a car (200W -> 80kW).

 

[mheslep]

Sure, the Oak Ridge experiment was far from full scale and nonetheless many of the expected challenges were investigated.5

 

[Sherwood Botsford]

Wow. Long running thread.

NIMBY is the current reaction. So don't put it in anyone's back yard. We have lots of granite in Canada that is geologically stable (billions of years...) and isn't populated. Roads are expensive to make, but even at a megabuck a mile, a 100 mile road to a big flat rock is cheap.

Use the energy to make methanol or hydrogen. Both are cheap to move. Methanol is easier to use with current infra-structure. Any current IC engine can be simply modified to use methanol instead. Old style engines require a different set of carburetor jets, newer ones, different fuel injectors. Certain plastic parts need to be replaced. Fuel tanks need to be coated against rust. (Methanol absorbs water from the air.) It's an easy reaction to convert methanol to di-methyl-ether which is a drop in replacement for diesel.

Surplus solar and wind energy can be used this way too. This gets around a lot of the availability issues. Overprovision by a factor of 2 or 3 , and use the surplus to make chemicals that can be burned.

The reaction to convert electrical energy to methanol is about 60% efficient. Don' t know how much work has been done with this. If used as a sink for surplus solar, the reactors need to be modified to live with interrupted power. I suspect that initially you would end up with about 10-20% of the load being uninterruptable. (Pumps, controls, monitors) and another fraction dispatchable on a few hours notice. (Shutdown processes)

Methanol/hybrid electric is the way to go for ground based transport.

Methanol doesn't have the same energy per pound or per gallon as hydrocarbons. Mileage is about half that of gasoline, either on a per volume or per mass base. This makes it very unattractive for aircraft, as it cuts the range in half.

When the thread started in 2004, power demand was continuing to rise. Demand is close to flat now. Increases in efficiency make up for growth.

 

[OmCheeto]

I am still fascinated by that little Canadian town, just south of Calgary.
I think I must have missed it the first time I skimmed David MacKay's book.
I'm now obsessed with the idea.

100% home heating, via solar, in Canada? I had a very hard time believing it.

Home heating is now my greatest annual energy expense, and as David said;

"A more realistic mantra is:

if everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little .", ​

ergo, I've decided to focus on "the big energy things" in my life.

ps. Yes, I've looked at the "financial" numbers for that community, and they don't look good.
But it was, as far as I can tell, a government funded experiment. And it's working!
I'm pretty sure I can get away with doing it for a fraction of the cost.
In a DIY hell, and contracted well digging, I think I can get it down to a 6 year payback.
Rough estimate, of course.
But it is so bizarre thinking that I would never have another heating bill.

 

[jim hardy]

I think Ammonia is a 'sleeper' concept.

https://ammoniaindustry.com/power-to-ammonia/

A good fit with existing infrastructure..

 

[OmCheeto]

I think Ammonia is a 'sleeper' concept.

https://ammoniaindustry.com/power-to-ammonia/

A good fit with existing infrastructure..

I thought you were the "aluminum air battery" advocate?

ps. I don't know enough about chemistry to make any intelligent comments about either. As I've said many times before; "My brain is FULL!"

 

[jim hardy]

I thought you were the "aluminum air battery" advocate?

OOhhhh Yeah ,,, that one will make somebody rich. Natural for automobiles it runs on empty beer cans..

 

[Sherwood Botsford]

100% is tricky, and is very location dependent in a cold climate.

That said, we have a 1983 house -- not even R2000 -- but with most of the glazing on the south side. The house is livable by solar heat down to about -10C on a sunny day. We heat with wood, and burn about 3 cords a year. We have gas, but it heats the domestic hot water only.

Getting to between 80-90% is easily doable.

Getting to 100% but not having it toasty (e.g. in a prolonged cloudy spell, your house may drop 10 C) is fairly doable.

Problems:
* With climate change we (I'm near Edmonton) are getting increasing stretches of cloudy cold weather. Insolation drops by about 2/3 If you get a stretch 2 weeks long, then you either have to store than many joules or you have to size your solar collectors to work with half the insolation. This requires a very different design. (It actually better to put up PV,. use what you need to heat water, sell the surplus to the grid. These glooms often occur in November coupled with temps in the -30's.

* Current house design doesn't optimize roof angles for solar collecting. This would be a simple bylaw building code change.

* The existence of trees in the neighborhood acts as a mixed blessing, reducing the number of hours of available light.

* December at Edmonton's latitude (54 degrees north) makes for a 7 hour day with maximum solar elevation at noon of 13 degrees. (I use my car's sun visor driving south at noon...) Sunlight is short, frequently behind something, and attenuated by its long slanted path through the atmosphere.

Super insulation --e.g. strawbale walls and 18" of cellulose in the attic, triple glazed argon filled windows, heat exchange ventilation -- can produce a house that for most of the year can be heated by the waste of the standard electrical load for the house.

Retrofitting:

* Tighten up the house. Few houses are as tight as one air exchange per hour and a half. If the rest of the house is R20, half your heat goes to heating new air. Cutting this in half is fairly straight forward: Door and window seals, seals around vents, and don't forget to check the seals around electrical outlets on outside walls. Recessed ceiling lights are another common heat leak.

* Once you have the house tight enough that it starts to feel stuffy at times, then put in a heat exchanger vent system in. If you have a forced air furnace this is easy. If you have electric or hydronic heating, it gets far more involved. Multiple smaller units may work better, as they would require far less ductwork.

 

[OmCheeto]

OOhhhh Yeah ,,, that one will make somebody rich. Natural for automobiles it runs on empty beer cans..

Ha! I just got a "LinkedIn" invite from my nephew in law. He has a PhD in Chemical engineering, and is working on "Biofuels" research for a fairly large company.
Perhaps I'll send him an email, asking his opinion about your Ammonia idea.

Holy moses! 7 patents & 6 publications. Damn that kid is smart.

 

[jim hardy]

Beware Linkedin. They used to steal your inbox and send invitations to everybody in it . Made me hopping mad. I think they got sued for that and quit but check with nephew and be sure he really sent it..

I get invites from people i never heard of. Would quit except i have found so many old friends there.

Patents and publications ? Sounds like Nephew is a chip off the old OM family block?

old jim

 

[OmCheeto]

Beware Linkedin. They used to steal your inbox and send invitations to everybody in it . Made me hopping mad. I think they got sued for that and quit but check with nephew and be sure he really sent it..

I get invites from people i never heard of. Would quit except i have found so many old friends there.

Patents and publications ? Sounds like Nephew is a chip off the old OM family block?

old jim

Actually, my "blood" relatives, like me, seem a bit daft. But they marry well.

...We heat with wood, and burn about 3 cords a year.
...

wow

It took me ≈10 years to burn through ≈3 cords of wood. Even at that rate, I determined it was not a trans-generational, sustainable source of heat.
My two trees were about 75 years old.

...
December at Edmonton's latitude (54 degrees north) makes for a 7 hour day with maximum solar elevation at noon of 13 degrees.
...

You might want to study up more on how Drake's Landing works. They don't rely on "basically zero" über northern latitude solar power during the winter. All of that energy is stored during the summer.

ps. I REALLY wish I had paid more attention to that MacKay guy, way back when.
Ugh. Even Marcus was interested in that guy. And Marcus was "over the top" smart, IMHO.

 

[Sherwood Botsford]

The generic topic is 'passive annual heat storage' I'm familiar with it. It isn't trivial to do. A quick BOTE ignoring solar gain showed that it would take a thermal mass of soil/rock about 1.5 times the footprint of the house, about 8 feet deep, heated to about 180 F to store a winter's heat. The obvious way to do this is under the house. But as Nick Pine comments in his solar works, you don't really want to live inside the heat battery.

In practice, you need the summer heat to level out the worst of the winter. It's your 'rainy day' fund of therms. This reduces the mass considerably, but you still need to insulate it very well to keep enough usable heat for 6 months.

At the community level, PAHS can be accomplished with a covered pond. Take an acre of pond, 20 feet deep, cover to keep the wind down. (Float a layer of bubble wrap on it?) Saturate the lower level with salt. Add agents of prevent algae. Float a layer of something like oleic acid to eliminate evaporation. The result is clear water that doesn't convect. Sunlight is transformed to heat at the bottom, but the hot salt water is still denser than the cooler fresh water. If you can establish a density gradient it works reasonable well. You pull heat out with a heat exchanger in the fluid. However this also creates thermal disturbances, and in practice you need to pull heat at a rate that is compatible with diffusion, not mass movement.

In practice the layers gradually mix. Upwelling salt water from the bottom hits the fresh water interface, and there is some mixing. It may be possible to find a plastic that is slightly denser than fresh water that could float on the layer of salt water.

My typical year has 10,000 degree heating days (F) per year.
It can vary about 20% on either side of that. Thats 240,000 degree heating hours. If your house is insulated at an average of R20 (Hard to do. Windows, doors, and air exchange bring it down) then each square foot of house envelope requires 12,000 BTU over the course of a year. So a 1000 sq ft house has about about 2000 sq ft of envelope, so now we are back up to 24 million BTU For you non-imperial units guys 1 million BTU ~ 1 gigajoule within about 5%

I have 15 acres of poplar bush. Poplar has roughly a 50-80 year life cycle, and has a net biomass productivity of about 1 ton per acre dry weight. A ton of dry poplar is about a cord. So at this stage I'm using about 20% of the net biomass productivity of my woods. In the 20 years I've done this, I've seen some improvements in the age distribution of trees, and a marked increase in the number of species. Can't say for certain that one causes the other.

 

[OmCheeto]

...
I have 15 acres of poplar bush.
...

Wondering if the average Canadian has access to 15 acres of Poplar?
I'm guessing, probably not.

 

[jack action]

Wondering if the average Canadian has access to 15 acres of Poplar?
I'm guessing, probably not.

Well according to this site, 13.1% of the 347 069 000 hectares of Canadian forest lands are Poplars (by volume). Assuming a population of 36 millions, with an average 2.5 persons per home, each home can have access to 78 acres of Poplar!

 

[OmCheeto]

Well according to this site, 13.1% of the 347 069 000 hectares of Canadian forest lands are Poplars (by volume). Assuming a population of 36 millions, with an average 2.5 persons per home, each home can have access to 78 acres of Poplar!

I believe, somewhere in the past, that I determined that Oregon(Omsville) could not sustain a harvestable tree crop.
And we're not Canada.
It's like Siberia or something up there!
Ok... Except for @DaveC426913 land, which freaked me out one day, as he lives 2° more southerly than I do, and Oregon isn't even on the Canadian border. ?
We're like, next to California.
hmmmm...

 

[mfb]

Well according to this site, 13.1% of the 347 069 000 hectares of Canadian forest lands are Poplars (by volume). Assuming a population of 36 millions, with an average 2.5 persons per home, each home can have access to 78 acres of Poplar!

Exclude everything in areas where (nearly) no one lives and the number gets much smaller.

 

[Sherwood Botsford]

Well, the phrasing of the question implied, what was I doing.

No, wood heat is not a sustainable solution for everyone. Air pollution makes it unworkable in cities.

If I threw $40,000 at my house, I could likely cut my wood use to a single cord a year, but I would have to burn it outside, and move hot water around.

There are a bunch of different solutions that will be location dependent. Anyone who lives on 10 or more acres rurally can heat with wood.

Better insulation.
Heat recovery ventilation.
Solar design.
Solar PV
Smaller houses.
Buried houses.
Wear more clothes.
Multiple dwelling housing.
Domed neighborhoods. (Like the big golf air inflated golf domes.)

 

[mfb]

250 acres = 1 square kilometer. 25 persons per square kilometer is extremely rural by European standards. As in: Basically non-existent outside Scandinavia and Russia. Here is a map. The average density is 75/km², and a large part of the area is not covered by woods.

 

[Astronuc]

http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2017/08/firstenergy_solutions_downgrad.html

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Standard & Poor's has further lowered its ratings for bonds sold by FirstEnergy Solutions because it believes the company's negotiations with creditors is a first step toward its seeking bankruptcy protection.

 

[berkeman]

Thread closed temporarily for Moderation...

 

[berkeman]

Thread re-opened after cleanup of a PMM discussion.

 

[CWatters]

Cost of offshore wind falling dramatically in the UK. Now requires less subsidy than nuclear..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41220948

Two firms said they were willing to build offshore wind farms for a subsidy of £57.50 per megawatt hour for 2022-23.

This compares with the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant securing subsidies of £92.50 per megawatt hour.

 

[mfb]

And if the wind doesn't blow, we switch off all lights.
Comparing the cost of a power plant you can regulate to the cost of wind-dependent power plants 1:1 just doesn't help.

 

[Clark Magnuson]

We built a super insulated solar home in 1982, tried to recycle everything privately, and tried to raise all our own food organically.
I did power conversion [designed power supplies and battery chargers] for a living for 30 years.
After so much of my hobby time went into "alternative energy", now I see much of it is common practice or turned out to not be cost effective.
My peers in high school in the 1960s modified their V8 cars to be faster in the quarter mile.
My peers in engineering in the 1980 designed their dream homes to be energy efficient and bought 4 cylinder cars, and in some cases made Mother Earth hybrid cars.
But the scare in college was that by the year 2000, most people would by dying of pollution. I think we averted that.

 

[rootone]

Right now there is a large anticyclone sitting in the North Atlantic,
Minimal wind is expected for several days in most of Europe.