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Guest essay by Viv Forbes
There is a massive problem with photo-voltaic solar power. Modern cities and industries require power 24/7 but solar panels can only deliver significant energy from 9am to 3pm on a clear day – a maximum of 25% of the time. Even within this time, energy production peaks at midday and falls off steeply on either side.
Science has yet to develop a solar storage battery suitable for grid power. It must be sufficiently large, cheap and efficient to hold the solar power generated during the short solar maximum so it can be used later, when peak demand usually occurs. This process requires that much of the solar energy produced in peak times would have to be devoted to recharging the massive battery.
A linked hydro plant would work in certain limited locations, but the same people advocating solar power are opposed to dam building for hydro power.
But Planet Earth has already solved this problem. For millions of years Earth has use photosynthesis to store solar energy via in wood and plant material then converted this to long-term storage in the form of coal.
Coal is nature’s answer to solar energy storage and in a wonderful bit of synergy, the process of recovering the energy releases back to the atmosphere the building blocks of life – water vapour and carbon dioxide. These are again converted back by solar energy into more plants/wood/coal. And the whole process does a bit towards postponing the next ice age and returning Earth to that warm, moist, verdant, life-filled environment that existed when the coals were formed.
Coal is a gift from Gaia – the 100% natural, clean, green and sustainable answer to Solar Energy Storage!
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
http://carbon-sense.com
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Coal is Satan’s rock. period?
Richard Feynman explains how a tree stores solar energy
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE&w=420&h=315%5D
As for solar storage, California is creating hydro dams, called pumped storage facitiies, which have been around for quite some time, only they served an economic purpose – they were (and still are) the repository of excess base power generation during periods of low demand during the day and then operate much as a mid or peak power generators when demand exceeds the base plant power output.
Base power plants (be they coal or nuclear) produce the cheapest power but those plants cannot be quickly powered up or down. So they run them at full bore and store excess power via pumped storage, rather than use higher cost peak power generators. At least that ‘s how it worked back when gas was very expensive. Nowadays no one would build them for that, since you lose a very significant amount of power thru attrition (upwards of 30%, I was told), and mainly, because gas is so cheap. California is building a half dozen or more pumped storage facilities with a capacity of 1 gigwatt for 12 hours when full of water. Cost is not much cheaper than a nuclear power plant, which costs roughly $5 billion these days. They are to be used to store their so-called “renewable energy.” But having a way to store some renewable energy output in no way eliminates the unreliability characteristics of renewable power like solar and wind. At most it allows you to time shift power generation to another part of the day. But who says that there will exist enough renewable energy available, for a day or a week or a month? The winds can die off for weeks at a time and for most of the US, the sun can also virtually disappear as an energy producer for extended periods . And once the batteries are depleted, how will they be refilled using renewables if there is no excess when the renewables reappear? Because of their unreliable nature, renewables (especially solar and wind) , if present in a sizable proportion, cause significant side effect costs, since they require backup power generation, which costs a lot to maintain, even if it never produces a kilowatthour of power. So you don’t just pay the renewable operator for his power – you also pay the power plants that maintains the backup capacity. The only time when renewables are not a headache is when they not part of the grid, even indirectly.
what about Nikolas Tesla ?? and his free energy ??
Box_of_Rocks responded to jai mitchell
“–as many as 10,000 deaths associated with coal-fired plants in the U.S. These deaths are due to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases caused by coal pollution.
…
Any way, of all the reported deaths, do you have the names of those who have died and the date they died on? ”
Those deaths are like the future warming. They are computer model deaths, that ignorant (or maybe scheming) policy makers use to support the conclusions they desire. Not real deaths of people with names and dates of death. After all the death rate is the same as ever, 100%.
jai mitchell says:
February 11, 2014 at 10:44 am
Simply research the author of the article you linked to. A bit bias I would say.
I’ve been calling coal stored solar energy for several years. We’ve gotten to where we can remove most of the real pollution when using coal. What’s left is CO2 that let’s the next generation of stored solar power develop.
Mark Kammerer says: @ur momisugly February 11, 2014 at 10:51 am
….you fail to mention that coal reserves are being used up in a minute fraction of the tens of millions of years it took for Gaia to produce them. And then what?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Thorium Nuclear and hopefully after that fusion.
Do you see large piles of Horse Manure in Washington DC… on second thought don’t answer that.
It is GOING to happen. The skuttlebutt is China is close to mini thorium reactor. Why should China use the technology created by the USA and then charge us for it?
And China isn’t wasting their money on large solar power installations. Nope, the are subsidizing their manufacturing and exports to get our money.
Darn the horse manure didn’t link.
marklar says:
February 11, 2014 at 11:25 am
…. Is Wal-Mart choosing to buy t-shirts from Bangladeshi factories a “war on American textiles”?….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If you ask that question around where I live you would get HE!! YES!
@Tom G(ologist) at 10:26 am
When I teach my 101 Geology course … I can hold up a piece of bituminous coal, explain how it is a solar battery and point to the lights in the room as proof that it works a charm and is not just some philosophical construct: I refer to it as ‘stored sunlight’.
I hope you take the lesson a step into physics and economics.
1 kg of coal, converted to electricity at 40% efficiency delivers 2680 watt-hours of electricity.
That kg of coal costs $30/ton delivered by unit train, or $0.03/kg.
ClaytonPower 400Ah Lithium-ion battery will hold 171 watt-hours/kg. (Note 1)
So for electrical energy, 1 kg coal = 15.64 kg Li-Ion battery
Li-Ion Batteries cost about $2.5/whr.
Or $0.03 of coal holds the same energy as $425.00 of li-ion batteries.
Ah! but you can recharge li-ion batteries!
Yes, about 1000 cycles.
So by the time you by use up $30 worth of coal, you have to replace your $425.00 li-ion battery bank.
Yes. Coal is nature’s solar powered battery.
It is even rechargeable — at geologic time scales. 😉
(Note 1: A Dell WHXY3 Laptop Battery – 11.1V, holds about 70 wh and weighs 2 lbs. For $60.
So that one kg of coal, holds more electrical power than about 35 laptops in the classroom.
marklar says:
February 11, 2014 at 11:25 am
The difference marklar is that the government did not tell Wal-Mart where to buy the t-shirts nor Apple to invent to I-phone, but the government has been telling the coal industry to do certain things that inhibit a free market in coal. So the war on coal is of the government’s making.
John Shaw says:
February 11, 2014 at 11:23 am
“Energy storage is possible for solar and wind, just look up Compressed Air Energy Storage. There is a plant in Alabama that has been operating since 1991 that can produce 110 MW of electrical power. It requires a large cavern to store the air, but we have been doing this with natural gas for years. Much more immediate than turning plants into coal.”
Well, anyone can produce 110 MW, the question is for how long.
Second, you didn’t mention the need for heat management during compression and decompression which drives down efficiency and drives up cost of a compressed air storage.
Third, what will the micro-earthquake-phobic fracking protesters say when they hear of the huge periodic pressure changes in old abandoned mines.
marklar says:
February 11, 2014 at 11:25 am
“Why aren’t libertarians hailing coal’s weaning competitiveness as a triumph of the free market? ”
Name me a market in which there is more political meddling than in the energy market, please.
Free = total bueraucracy ? That drives Orwellianism into overload.
“Coal is a 19th century technology that is experiencing its death gasp and this is NOT a class war.”
Well just send it over here to Germany and we’ll torture it to death in our coal power plants; and thanks for the cheap exports.
What ‘free energy’?
You have sources on that, besides the usual “Keepers Of Odd Knowledge” (K.O.O.K.) websites?
You realize his ideas on RF (radio wave) transmission was warped, he disagreed with Hertz and Marconi, and even disavowed the ionosphere’s Rf propagation properties as proposed by Heaviside (and which said ionosphere was depended upon for world-wide communication for well over 100 years)?
Here – read an actual ‘work’ by Tesla and witness his mis-comprehension for yourself (he can be little blamed for his misunderstanding, for his specialty was not ‘radio’ and EM waves but rather power systems):
Reprint of his 1919 work: http://www.free-energy-info.com/TeslaTrueWireless.pdf
Web/HTML version: http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1919-05-00.htm
THEN read the review/analysis/comparison of Tesla’s proposed system against what is known _now_ here:
. . . http://www.teslaradio.com/pages/compare.htm
.
marklar says:
February 11, 2014 at 11:25 am
“Coal is a 19th century technology that is experiencing its death gasp and this is NOT a class war.”
Another remark. You claim “and this is NOT a class war.”. Hmm. So it is not the destruction of 30% of the population during a civil war followed by a purge. That’s really nice to hear; but WHAT in the world made you say that?
There are good reason aside from AGW (which I consider unproven at best) to want to switch away from coal over time. The fact that carbon emissions probably isn’t one of them is no reason to discount the others.
That’s why I’ve thought that effective solar will likely be a hybrid of engineered plant material, bacterial material, and nano-tech, which will immediately produce electricity as needed and shift to produce sugar (to be converted to liquid hydrocarbons later) or liquid hydrocarbons in situ when demand is low. It will probably become economical near when photosynthesis is naturally optimal, when CO2 concentration are above 1000ppm.
Coal supplies, are the product of millions of year of nature’s conversion of solar energy to chemical energy. While vast, humans could use up all this “stored energy” in a few hundred years.
Nature has been working for billions of years trying to perfect the conversion of solar energy to a storable format. The best she can do is a few tenths of a percent efficiency. That is why biofuels are a very bad idea. See…
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/nobel-prize-winning-biochemist-says-all-biofuels-are-nonsense/
We have a great solar battery, a gift from Gaia even. It stores eons of solar energy, coal.
Just another example of the 4Es (eastern establishment environmental elitists) against working people: the Keystone XL pipeline conflict.
It’s sad that environmentalism has basically become Climate Change, because it sold itself out and lost its moral authority. There are plenty of problems with coal, such as SOx and NOx emissions, carbon MONoxide, particulates, heavy metals, and even some radioactive emissions. Burning coal is not a clean process. Environmentalists used to talk about those problems, but no longer.
Anyone else note that this reads a lot like those annoying DHHS/EPA PSAs often [quote] sponsored [unquote] by the ‘Ad Council’?
http://www.hhs.gov/
http://www.epa.gov/
http://www.adcouncil.org/Donate-Ad-Space
So, now you know; that air time is *donated* by the station/network to the Ad Council to run those annoying PSAs …
.
yes, actually, air pollution DOES cause early mortality in human beings! (shocking I know!!!!)
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/study-air-pollution-causes-200000-early-deaths-each-year-in-the-us-0829.html
The greatest number of emissions-related premature deaths came from road transportation, with 53,000 early deaths per year attributed to exhaust from the tailpipes of cars and trucks
Pollution from electricity generation still accounted for 52,000 premature deaths annually. The largest impact was seen in the east-central United States and in the Midwest: Eastern power plants tend to use coal with higher sulfur content than Western plants.
Unsurprisingly, most premature deaths due to commercial and residential pollution sources, such as heating and cooking emissions, occurred in densely populated regions along the East and West coasts. Pollution from industrial activities was highest in the Midwest, roughly between Chicago and Detroit, as well as around Philadelphia, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Industrial emissions also peaked along the Gulf Coast region, possibly due to the proximity of the largest oil refineries in the United States.