green power solar is

[storchy neil]

I lugged around an A510 military transceiver for a while, two heavy boxes around my waist. It had a big whip aerial but half the time it didn't work. Now the same function is the size of a cigarette packet!
pmcc i know what your saying the yanks carried mine cause I was a little bloke and they felt sorry for me neil

 

[Marty_d]

What's your news source, Neil?

 

[nomadpete]

The failures were -

Two boilers developed leaks - a sign of poor maintenance during the last regular stripdown.-

One generator out of service due to scheduled maintenance.

The whole of the state generation capacity cannot hold up when two boilers fail. The problem was not caused by anything other than 'unplanned failure' of existing infrastructure.

There are ways to plan the grid to cope with the situation. Queensland did, way back in the 80's when it built a pump storage hydro generator at Wivenhoe Dam. By current standards it isn't large but it would have easily filled the energy shortfall that Victoria had .

 

[facthunter]

Really funny(if it wasn't so serious). Boiler tubes don't just fail suddenly. It's a deterioration over years. A coal power station has to have a life of around 60 years. and it doesn't go that long without a strict maintenance regime. 3 Big COAL generators out of service on a record hot day and your fanatics blame solar and wind, because they are there (somewhere) so they must be to blame. IF the old SEC was still in charge you wouldn't have this outcome. Profiteers seeking to squeeze every cent out of neglected machinery are the cause here. The system should NEVER have been privatized then it would be more reliable or heads would roll.. They HAD the needed expertise in house. No on else to blame Nev

 

[Bruce]

What about the snowy hydro for Vic, nomad?

 

[pmccarthy]

Yes, the coal fired infrastructure has been run down by profiteers. And no new power stations built. The reason is political, not technological. Failures and blackouts will get worse unless government steps in.

 

[facthunter]

Internally the LNP haven't been able to come to any agreement they stick with. Nev

 

[nomadpete]

I haven't done the research on the proposed Snowy Hydro pump storage but it sounds like somebody's brainfart.
I believe there are more practical locations for pump storage but we haven't had any governments that are brave enough to start up forward thinking infrastructure projects - especially ones that take longer than an election cycle to complete. For fear that somebody else gets the credit.

 

[facthunter]

Initially Turnbull took the credit for that, but Bananaboy wanted to scrap it. HE just LOVES Turnbull.. you know.. . They envisage Coal could be stored this way. I would imaging it's ideal for wind and solar where the cost is low for the initial "excess" electricity.. You can't just turn COAL on and off and it's only efficient near full output. like diesel etc . ALL storage involves a cost penalty. (like taking it a long distance through transformers and wires) Battery response is almost instant. NOTHING beats it in that respect. No one, but no one is going to have a coal fired power station just sitting there, that can be powered up to fill a need in less than days and the cost of having it there unused just in case is ridiculous.. Why schedule a full overhaul in the hottest part of the year?. ALL the failures have been distribution (network) or coal fired power stations failing on hot days You won't get a cloudy day with no windover the WHOLE of Australia. Newer solar works on cloudy days..Nev

 

[Litespeed]

There is also the argument that planned maintenance and decisions to declare a fault critical on the highest demand days of the years ensured that spot prices jumped through the roof allowing a surge in profitability from other supplies. Which are also owned by the same power groups.

If not planned maintenance would be done in the lowest demand periods ie spring and Autumn.

Cynical but possible.

 

[kgwilson]

Various right wing politicians plus hansenites, independents that got in on 19 primary votes etc keep rabbiting on about new coal fired power as if it was the evangelical saviour. The coal industry even has TV ads about what they call clean coal technology which doesn't exist. It is just less polluting that what our existing 50 year old coal technology delivers. Not only is that 100% wrong but NO ONE on the planet is prepared to finance it. Why do you think that is?

Those who have the finance, assess the risk before taking into account any consideration of the pollution that may be caused. They are not going to put their money into some long term investment that is guaranteed to fail are they? No they are much smarter than that. Wind and solar provide positive gains in the very short term. They are gaining momentum exponentially because the cost per mwh is lower than any fossil fuelled generation and the gap is widening by the day.

 

[facthunter]

A windfarm doesn't destroy the paddock it's in. You'd only have to manage the weeds and IF you put the panels high enough it could be watered if need be and grazed. Later, when the panels are time expired, if you wanted to use the land for something else the cleanup cost would be minimal compared with ANYTHING else.. In the meantime no CO2 or methane. EVERY industrial estate could have panels on the extensive roof areas. . In equatorial regions there could be more shaded areas provided over the roads where if covered in panels would lower the ambient temps considerably. . We haven't started really trying yet. Nev

 

[spacesailor]

"EVERY industrial estate could have panels on the extensive roof areas. "

EVERY industrial estate SHOULD have panels on the extensive roof areas. .
I agree.
All Council's should put a little of our rates to better use,
Solar awning's for shade AND street lights from the solar.
How about free solar panels for Private housing paid by a Little rate increase across the board. I've no idea how many houses in Parramatta.
If half a million, $2 on the rates gives a $ Million worth of panels. Is it feasible Who will take the trouble to find those answers.
spacesailor

 

[octave]

The thing is that there is no shortage of energy on planet earth. We have reached the stage where capturing energy is cheaper than releasing energy in coal that took millions of years to collect. The problem is storing that energy in a way that is economical and can be used exactly when needed. At the moment the electrons that are powering my computer so that I can type this rubbish are being produced and used straight away. This is not the way we produce and consume other products, it is a "just in time" production system that is literally just in time. The problem then is storage. This problem is being solved and whilst we know the limitations of today's chemical batteries we tend to ignore how quickly technological problems in the past have been solved. As a follower of news on these subjects, I am optimistic about recent developments in batteries, for example, the joint research collaboration between Honda, NASAs jet propulsion laboratories and Caltech on Flouride Ion batteries as well as many other types of battery. Apart from that, there are other good things happening. Here is a video about pumped compressed air storage.

 

[facthunter]

Yeah I heard about that one. (In England) Not cheap. There's lots of ways to store energy. Big flywheels, electrolysis. drive heavy electric loco's up hill,to generate when they come downhill. Grow cellulose Flax etc. If you burn anything genuinely renewable it's sustainable. Not good when you cut down rainforest to do it though. Algea can produce hydrocarbons... Nev

 

[Yenn]

I didn't bother looking at the video about compressed air storage. Have you ever used air tools, they take a vast amount of air to do a little bit of work. The iar drill I have uses more electricity than an electric drill by the time I run the compressor.
There was a mob in Spain I think that a few years ago tried to run cars on compressed air and it never got off the ground.
When you compress air, the first thing is an increase in heat and that has to be stored to maintain the energy in the air. The alternative is to poke a bit of diesel fuel into it and you have got a compression ignition engine.

 

[octave]

I didn't bother looking at the video about compressed air storage. Have you ever used air tools, they take a vast amount of air to do a little bit of work. The iar drill I have uses more electricity than an electric drill by the time I run the compressor.
There was a mob in Spain I think that a few years ago tried to run cars on compressed air and it never got off the ground.
When you compress air, the first thing is an increase in heat and that has to be stored to maintain the energy in the air. The alternative is to poke a bit of diesel fuel into it and you have got a compression ignition engine.

Yenn it is a shame you did not watch the video because there is a thorough analysis of the energy efficiency. Also, there are already 2 plants working now, The Huntorf plant in Germany with (290MWh with a 42% efficiency and the Mcintosh plant in Alabama (110MWh at 54% efficiency.) These are both Diabatic, meaning the heat you mention is dispersed into the atmosphere as waste. Both of these plants require the burning of some gas to heat the air as it is utilized.

The experimental plant in the video stores the heat and uses it to reheat the air as it is used.
The two plants that are running are doing so commercially and economically. Both of these facilities have been operating successfully for many years.

 

[pmccarthy]

Releasing heat into the atmosphere. But isn't that.......?

 

[octave]

Releasing heat into the atmosphere. But isn't that.......?

That is why the latest pilot plants are using systems where the heat created in the compression stage is stored and used to reheat the air in the expansion phase.

Near Isothermal
Near isothermal compression (and expansion) is a process in which a gas is compressed in very close proximity to a large incompressible thermal mass such as a heat absorbing and releasing structure (HARS) or a water spray. A HARS is usually made up of a series of parallel fins. As the gas is compressed the heat of compression is rapidly transferred to the thermal mass, so the gas temperature is stabilised. An external cooling circuit is then used to maintain the temperature of the thermal mass. The isothermal efficiency (Z)[7] is a measure of where the process lies between an adiabatic and isothermal process. If the efficiency is 0%, then it is totally adiabatic; with an efficiency of 100%, it is totally isothermal. Typically with a near isothermal process an efficiency of 90-95% can be expected.

Compressed air energy storage - Wikipedia
Storage

• 1978 – The first utility-scale compressed air energy storage project was the 290 megawatt Huntorf plant in Germany using a salt dome.
• 1991 – A 110 megawatt plant with a capacity of 26 hours was built in McIntosh, Alabama (1991). The Alabama facility's $65 million cost works out to $590 per kW of generation capacity and about $23 per kW-hr of storage capacity, using a 19 million cubic foot solution mined salt cavern to store air at up to 1100 psi. Although the compression phase is approximately 82% efficient, the expansion phase requires combustion of natural gas at one third the rate of a gas turbine producing the same amount of electricity.[17][18][19]
• December, 2012 – General Compression completes construction of a 2 MW near-isothermal CAES project in Gaines, TX; the world's third CAES project. The project uses no fuel.[20]

 

[nomadpete]

Wow. Impressive stuff Octave.
I'd always believed that compressed air was too lossy to contemplate for energy storage.
That was my preconceived notion. What happened to that 2012 pilot plant?