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DESERTEC - major transcontinental renewable energy plan

kyser_soze said:
Why not just convert the supertanker fleet into the 'super battery' fleet, plug them into a big fuck off plug in Alhambra, sail off to whereever they're going, then plug them in again? Or similar.
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because it's way more efficient to run a HVDC cable instead, and we'll need all the batteries we can get to power cars etc on land.
 
david dissadent said:
Not quite DESERTEC but similar so I thought Id tack it on here.

Eurosuper grid for the NW European\ Atlantic states to share wind and other renewables under discussion.

For once the dozy slow kid at the back of the class is involved with this one.... (yes us).
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Bernie Gunther said:
Interesting, bet they don't do it. Nuclear lobby is too strong and on too dodgy ground to tolerate workable alternatives.
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I bet they do - look at the engineering firms involved in DESERTEC and the Supergrid, they're also nuke plant builders hedging their bets on what'll win. Plus in large parts of continental Europe there is no real nuclear lobby to speak of.

Anyone know how the math of solar thermal planets works in terms of sqm of mirrors to X amount of energy? I'm moving to Oz in 3 years, and have a plan of building a house with a mini solar thermal thing on the roof, possibly in some kind of bowl shape but have no idea what the area/power numbers are...
 
Depends on your collection method. if you're trying for electricity, high pressure steam turbines will be a little out of your price range, so a Stirling engine would be your only sensible method, I think. I don't know how small they can be sensibly made. A bowl-shaped collector would have to be steered to the sun at all times. Parabolic, with linear collector would be easier to make, requiring just one steering axis.

Personally, I'd go for off the shelf solar water heaters and a starter PV setup that you can add to as money allows (prices are droppping all the time). Mass market solar will be cheaper than some fancy custom solution, and you'll have support.
 
Yowser! The whole house revolves to face the sun:

solarhaus.jpg
 
Alt 0185 ¹
Alt 0178 ²
Alt 0179 ³

That's as big as they go before you need tricky formatting that vbulletin doesn't have
 
Hold down the Alt key and type the number

Start > Run > "Charmap" > Return
(Windows Key + R > "Charmap" > Return

And you can look up the shortcuts to every glyph in the font (or, rather, the first 256, cos it's a hangover from dos)
 
Agreed. The only thing that I don't understand is why they're not scaling up the project! It's a win win for everybody, especially any North African country jumping on board with with huge future revenue streams (I take it we'll be paying the producing country for energy generated by them).
 
Isn't the big problem for Britain that we'd be significantly dependent on other countries for our energy?
 
Quartz said:
The alternative is to build nuclear power stations here. Which looks to be a much better option for the security-aware.
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Greater liability long term (economic and environmental), huge security hazard, and - and this is the real clincher - runs on a limited fuel resource.

In contrast, the North African/European super-grid, combining DESERTEC, north sea/north atlantic wind & wave power and several other big natural-tap resources are essentially unlimited.

DESERTEC-Map_without_squares_medium.JPG
 
Quartz said:
Isn't the big problem for Britain that we'd be significantly dependent on other countries for our energy?
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well, yes and no.

we'd be relying on lots of other countries for part of our power, with lots of other countries also being partially reliant on us for part of their power. A bit like the internet, so if one node goes down / country goes rogue, it shouldn't really affect us too badly. Any country playing silly buggers would probably be shooting themselves in the foot anyway as even in morocco the sun doesn't shine every single day of the year, and they need some night time power that won't be coming from CST even with it's heat storage capacity for night time generation.

Done properly, with the UK doing it's bit and building tens / hundreds of gigawatts (peak) of offshore wind, wave, tidal, tidal stream etc. we'd be as reliant on the likes of norway, and Iceland using their hydro capacity to buffer us when our generation was peaking at the wrong time (plus give us extra back when we need it) as we would on north africa to supply us with CST when the wind wasn't blowing... although the CST with thermal storage also gives the ability to buffer wind etc as well.

IMO we missed a major trick by not negotiating this with Iceland when they owed us all that dosh... actually maybe it's not too late for that:hmm:

erm, anyway, back to the point... we'd not be relying on one country to supply us with a large proportion of our energy requirements, as is likely to be the case with gas and russia if we don't go down the desertec route (although this is less of a problem for us as it is for most of Europe as we've been developing LNG terminal facilities to allow us to bring significant quantities of gas in by boat from the gulf etc to ensure diversity of supply)
 
kyser_soze said:
Greater liability long term (economic and environmental), huge security hazard,
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The French experience suggests otherwise. And Chernobyl killed far fewer people than the coal industry does. It would be interesting to compare the radiation and fallout released by Chernobyl with the radiation and fallout released by the burning of coal.

and - and this is the real clincher - runs on a limited fuel resource.
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Supplies of uranium are vast.

free spirit said:
well, yes and no.

we'd be relying on lots of other countries for part of our power, with lots of other countries also being partially reliant on us for part of their power. A bit like the internet, so if one node goes down / country goes rogue,
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It's not really a single country going rogue that bothers me, for much the reasons you point out. And this system will need to be resilient to generators going down for maintenance anyway. It's more lack of maintenance, which is more likely in politically unstable areas, having a cascade effect, which we've seen in both the U.K. and America.

Colour me cautious, but I think the U.K. needs to invest in its own power system, and right now that means nuclear fission. Power stations of whatever hue take time to build, and we should start sooner rather than later. And if they ever crack fusion, building the generators will still take years but then we'll be able to decommission the fission reactors early.
 
Supplies of uranium are vast.
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They won't be so vast if everyone suddenly switches to nukes and starts burning it. Not to mention the wide array of health and economic issues surrounding extraction. At present, uranium is still subject to Huberts Peak laws:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

The French experience suggests otherwise.
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That's because there's no public debate about it. There was a great article in Le Monde about 3 years ago that discussed how the French public basically bury their heads in the sand when it comes to fuel disposal, and more interestingly, how despite having all this carbon free leccy, still have carbon footprints comparable with other EU & G7 nations.
 
Falcon said:
Free spirit - my sense is that it is just the wrong thing to do. In grid based systems you lose about 40% of the original energy source in transmission losses (i.e. nearly half of all the energy available in, say, North Sea oil is used to heat up the air and ground around the transmission cables getting it to your home).

That's worked for 50 years because oil is such an incredible dense energy source we can afford to throw half of it away. After 50 years, we can only conceive of energy supply in terms of the centralized generation/grid distribution model.

But the essential problem with renewable sources is their low energy density. There is simply no process (other than problematic nuclear) that can replicate the effect of compressing thousands of years of sunlight into a cup of liquid that comes out of the ground under its own pressure. There just isn't sufficient surplus energy to absorb transmission losses and still provide useful work at the far end.

The problem gets much worse when you stop having hydrocarbon based energy sources available with which to construct all your PV arrays, wind turbines, wave transducers and transmission systems (and mine and process the raw materials from which they are constructed) and start siphoning power off from your grid to power the grid's own manufacturing energy needs.

It all stems from imagining that life as powered by hydrocarbon can go on. Substantial reduction in consumption and co-location of power generation and consumption (to reduce transmission losses) and co-location of where folk live and work (to reduce transportation losses) are about the only way I see things enduring.

Bottom line? Grid based renewable systems are cargo cult stuff (ill-considered effort and ceremony take place but go unrewarded due to flawed models of causation) - looks like a power supply, but isn't a power supply.
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theres alot of talk about solar energy but as mentioned here the problem is it's energy density. also any electricity generated can't be stored for long, til it's used. the figures quoted for solar effiency are never replicated in practice.
from what i've read the best available solution is to use the electricity from this venture to produce hydrogen, then convert to ammonia. ammonia has a greater energy density and can be transported and stored alot easier than hydrogen. it's also been demonstration to run in cars (with modifications).
 
The benefit of this plan is that it would use solar thermal electricity generation. This means you can store heat on-site (using eg. salt as the working fluid) and maintain a constant baseline output during the night/cloudy weather. Transmission losses (on the way to existing grids) are minimal due to the use of HVDC.
 
kyser_soze said:
They won't be so vast if everyone suddenly switches to nukes and starts burning it.
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I disagree: you can use breeder reactors to produce plutonium from the useless U-238. Or you can use thorium-based reactors. There are plenty of options.

Not to mention the wide array of health and economic issues surrounding extraction.
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Given that it is economically extractable from seawater, I'm not so sure about that.

That's because there's no public debate about it. There was a great article in Le Monde about 3 years ago that discussed how the French public basically bury their heads in the sand when it comes to fuel disposal,
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So? Evidently they feel that there is no need for a debate; it still does not seem to be a problem for them. And how many of their reactors have done a Chernobyl?

Fission power is the way forward for baseline load for the medium (20-70 years) term. There is, as yet, no alternative, but it will give us time to develop one.
 
Quartz said:
I disagree: you can use breeder reactors to produce plutonium from the useless U-238. Or you can use thorium-based reactors. There are plenty of options.



Given that it is economically extractable from seawater, I'm not so sure about that.



So? Evidently they feel that there is no need for a debate; it still does not seem to be a problem for them. And how many of their reactors have done a Chernobyl?

Fission power is the way forward for baseline load for the medium (20-70 years) term. There is, as yet, no alternative, but it will give us time to develop one.
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as I've discussed before many times on this topic though, the french have spent 2 generations setting up their entire energy infrastructure to cope with the problems associated with high levels of nuclear - namely that it can't cope with high levels of variation between peak daytime and low night-time usage levels. A large proportion of french household and business heating is therefore done via storage heaters, with high levels of economy 7 usage to dramatically flatten out day time and night time demand levels, and reduce the morning and evening peaks.

This is not something that can be achieved overnight, particularly not when we as a country have (rightly) spent the last 20 years persuading as many people as possible to upgrade their heating systems to condensing gas boilers, meaning they're not likely to want to upgrade again en masse for quite a while. The government (or at least the previous one) over the last couple of years did develop a huge fixation with heat pumps, due largely to prof mackay's influence, as he'd convinced himself and others via some highly dubious back of the envelope calcs using manufacturers performance data rather than real world figures that heatpumps were gods gift to mankind. Unfortunately due to utter incompetence in government and industry, they're being installed without buffer tanks, which means basically that they will increase the morning and evening peak demand rather than flattening out that demand, so the main useful function they could have supplied is negated.

The french also have the ability to export their excess nuclear power to other countries around them who have the ability to absorb that extra power by switching off their fossil fuel based generators / using pump storage. If we had the same level of nuclear as france then both us and france would need to invest seriously in additional HVDC interconnects with several other countries as we couldn't export to each other. If the whole of Europe went down this route, well basically we'd be fucked / have to export it to africa via HVDC lines... therefore arguing against desertec, and for nuclear is basically an arguement based on a false prospectus.

The lack of control over the supply is constantly used as a stick to beat the renewables lobby with, yet this major problem with high levels of nuclear is rarely even mentioned. The biggest civil engineering project the UK had ever seen was the building of the UK's 3GW of pump storage facilities that was only required to offset nuclear's always on problem, yet still the nuclear lobby has the barefaced cheek to spread bullshit about the need for spinning fossil fuel reserve to back up renewables etc.

basically, unless you've got a nuclear power station up your sleeve that can be switched on and off in significantly less than the current 24 hour minimum shutdown time, then nuclear is a massive red herring (ignoring all it's other problems), and the only reason the politicians love it so much is that they need it to be able to maintain the pretence of an independent nuclear deterrent, simple as that.
 
Crispy said:
The benefit of this plan is that it would use solar thermal electricity generation. This means you can store heat on-site (using eg. salt as the working fluid) and maintain a constant baseline output during the night/cloudy weather. Transmission losses (on the way to existing grids) are minimal due to the use of HVDC.
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that's one benefit of it.

The main benefit of it being that it would link up so many different renewable sources across such a large area, as well as linking the buffering capabilities offered by hydro in norway, geothermal and hydro in iceland, pump storage in the UK etc (plus the buffereing capability of CST), plus bioenergy plants that can be used for peaking, and reducing amounts of high efficiency fossil fuel generation for peaking / buffering, that problems matching variability in supply and demand should cease being a problem.
 
didn't want to see this thread die.


dodgy soundtrack to open with and the translator seems to have taken a line or two. but otherwise a good
documentary.
 
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