Renewables

[xsampa]

Have any of you been electrical engineers or permanant members of any branch of science/engineering dealing with renewables?

[Cray]

Have any of you been electrical engineers or permanant members of any branch of science/engineering dealing with renewables?

A bit. I can't give you advice on wiring up a solar panel to your house, but I can give a general perspective on them.

[stevebowers]

My degree was a long time ago, but it was in environmental science, so I've got a rough idea of the problems, which are many. The most difficult problems are likely to be political ones, to be honest, and everybody is at a disadvantage when considering political problems, since they are largely affected by irrational processes.

[FrodoGoofball]

Have any of you been electrical engineers or permanant members of any branch of science/engineering dealing with renewables?

My degrees are officially in Mechanical Engineering, but my more recent work was in materials science, which is closely tied to renewables.

A summary of my work and views on renewables may be found here.

Since this was written, many U.S. renewable producers have collapsed (IMHO due to a combination of less-than-stellar management and policies driving perverse incentives), but worldwide demand for nonconvetional energy sources ("fracking", solar mirror, wind, etc.) continues to grow, and there have been new innovations in wind, solar, and storage, but nothing likely to change the state of the market for the next few years.

[xsampa]

My degree was a long time ago, but it was in environmental science, so I've got a rough idea of the problems, which are many. The most difficult problems are likely to be political ones, to be honest, and everybody is at a disadvantage when considering political problems, since they are largely affected by irrational processes.

@Steve: The biggest problem, to quote John Michael Greer, is that the political will to transition to renewables has been MIA since the 1980s when the Reagan/Thatcher admins. turned their backs on them and encouraged a mass oil-guzzling spree . Nowadays, the transition only seems to be just restarting from the 70s movement, with projects like DESERTEC only focused on 1 type of renewable on a national or state-based scale; local grids have proven effective.

[Cray]

The fundamental problems with renewables is their price. I know manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels is getting cheaper, but that's only one aspect of the price problem. Wind and solar deliver energy at inconvenient, unplanned times, and none of the countries supporting serious renewable projects (e.g., Germany) are building matching storage systems. Germany, for all its renewable power, is far behind the US in power storage capacity. This is forcing all sorts of awkward utility compromises: running base-load plants like coal in load-following modes; selling electricity at a loss when they get an off-schedule glut of wind or solar; and so on. The result is costly. Here's the German perspective on the problem:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germ...20288.html

Germany's got all the political will in the world to ram forward with renewable power generation, but it isn't building a complete renewable grid. Its response to erratic renewable output is to ignore storage (like pumped hydro, compressed air, even batteries), shut down clean nuclear plants, and open coal plants running on Germany's local, filthy brown coal.

A smart approach would be to mandate that a given capacity of renewables would be matched to some amount of storage.

And if you can, stop the irrational fear and hate of nuclear power. If you can get a nation running 40-50% on nuclear, then a combination of renewables and stored energy would cover the peak loads and rest of the nation's needs.

[FrodoGoofball]

The state of renewables in the U.S. as I understand it:

In the U.S., the main programs had been (1) government subsidizing companies that either manufacture or use renewables, and (2) power companies paying customers who use renewables a subsidy. However, even with the subsidies, U.S. renewable companies are unable to be 100% competitive with Chinese manufacturers and hydraulic fracturing - derived fossil fuels, known here as "fracking".

The government had expected that with proper funding, manufacturers would be making improvements at a consistent rate analogous to (but much slower than) Moore's Law. While improvements have occurred, there have been a lot of disappointments, leading some manufacturers to use "bad science" to maintain their funding. Ultimately, most of those efforts failed.

Meanwhile, the administration, while it opposes nuclear and fossil fuels to please environmentalists and the "not in my backyard" crowd, supports fracking because it (1) is propping up the economy, and (2) statistically looks very good in terms of oil independence and air pollution. This has caused renewables to add to the political split in the U.S., because surviving semi-private renewable energy support environmental and social-progressive policies if only because they need more funding, while fracking and private renewables would prefer deregulation instead.

At the same time, power companies are beginning to be unable to handle the spikes in production from increased renewable energy producers, and the programs to encourage renewables are causing energy distributors to loose money, so they are trying to reduce or eliminate payments to people trying to sell them energy. Local governments don't like this - they'd prefer to raise rates and provide energy subsidies so that the middle class subsidize the poor and the rich to subsidize renewables, but middle class voters don't want to pay a penny more, and the rich are increasingly moving to lower overall tax burden areas.

In the last year or so, more wealthier homeowners have become interested in renewables for their own personal use. So you've got construction companies pre-wiring new homes for solar and new wind turbines being built even though there's no market or storage system available for the power, because it sells houses. And meanwhile, rural roads are crowded with convoys of fracking equipment trucks.

[stevebowers]

There is a case to be made that uranium could be considered a renewable source of energy; if uranium extraction from seawater were to be combined with fast-breeder technology, then the amount of energy produced would be both ample and effectively indefinite in duration.
See
http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_164.shtml

Fast breeder reactors, using uranium from the oceans

If fast reactors are 60 times more efficient, the same extraction of ocean
uranium could deliver 420 kWh per day per person. At last, a sustainable
figure that beats current consumption! – but only with the joint help of two
technologies that are respectively scarcely-developed and unfashionable:
ocean extraction of uranium, and fast breeder reactors.

Even if both of these technologies worked perfectly, we would find it tricky to develop them within the next century, so I doubt that they will be the solution to our energy problem. Luckily there are several other options available.

[FrodoGoofball]

Another option for future energy is new forms of nuclear power. A number of papers have suggested using thorium as raw fuel rather than uranium. As I understand it, thorium exposed to sufficient radiation from a uranium "seed" converts into uranium, producing a sustainable reaction with less possibility of a meltdown (See here for thorium reactors mentioned in OA). I don't completely understand the physics well enough to verify this, but it looks fairly reasonable. Thorium is also found in sea water, but I think it is much less common than uranium. However, thorium is fairly common in certain mineral deposits and is more common in space than Uranium.

Of course, there's also fusion. Unfortunately, there have been multiple setbacks in recent years, but the work I've seen lately suggests that neither laser ignition, which has consistently failed to sustain a reaction long enough to even come close to break even, nor "cold" fusion, which consistently produces inconsistent results, are completely "dead" as possible sources of future energy.

A CBS News report suggests that scientists are realizing we don't understand nuclear reactions as well as we thought we did.

[xsampa]

Renewables without Hot Air is a book written by the chief advisor to the UK's Department and Climate Change. It analyzes hard numbers about renewables to decide if we can support industrial civilization, the UK in this instance, on them.