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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
OmegaPaladin:
At February 11, 2014 at 1:14 pm you say
Those “problems” have all been solved and that is why “Environmentalists used to talk about those problems, but no longer”.
AGW cannot be solved because it is only an imaginary problem and not a real problem.
Which is why environmentalists make a fuss about it.
Richard
jai mitchell says: February 11, 2014 at 10:44 am
‘Explorer In Residence’, how does he manage that?
With apologies to George Carlin: What if man is nature’s way of returning to the cycle of life the carbon it had improvidently sequestered?
Just a thought. Mother Nature has optimized energy storage with CO2 levels around but less than 1000ppmv. Surely, with appropriate genetic engineering, we could produce organizisms which operate at much higher concentrations of CO2, which would require smaller areas over which to operate.
For those who think that the natural cycle for coal (a few million years) is too long, algae farms provide an accelerated cycle and use the same power stations..
Well done.
The proper response to enviro-speak, is to reply in kind.
Persons who chose to use emotional manipulation rather than logic, deserve all the scorn they attract.
As in cleaning up the largest (natural) oilspill known to mankind… Fort McMurray Canada.
ha…..sounds like someone starving because their religion forbids them to eat
Mike Jonas says:
February 11, 2014 at 2:02 pm
“For those who think that the natural cycle for coal (a few million years) is too long, algae farms provide an accelerated cycle and use the same power stations..”
Some practical problems:
a) removing the water without expending more energy than you harvest
b) prevent your pipes, tanks etc from clogging
c) open ponds? Forget them, they’ll get contaminated with species you don’t want in your Algae biodiesel production.
As soon as someone solves these problems and starts selling his Algae diesel for a competitive price I’m all for it.
Given the uptake of solar, gas, wind and general energy efficiency and the resulting demand destruction it produces as witnessed in many Australian states, I think coal is dead in the water, it’s slowly going to be replaced… unless there is a large uptake of electric cars to replace the demand destruction … The strange thing here is that some utilities are actually championing electric cars here in Oz… I think they see the writing on the wall…
Well, I enjoyed Viv Forbes essay – I was feeling a bit grumpy and it cheered me up!
I am a raving sceptic but this closing line exposes us to ridicule. Coal CAN be made clean via scrubbers but the sweeping statement says when I cook my lunch with coal it’s clean! Or maybe it doesn’t mean that but Viv should have said so. We can’t complain about soot on ice reducing albedo then say that chucking soot in the air is clean. It’s not. See London smogs. NB I use coal and charcoal to cook my lunch every single day because that is what I have. I will burn wood if necessary but I will be damned if I am going to rely on solar cookers on an overcast day.
I am strongly against forcing people to use solar via legislation and fines as well as relying on it for the national grid. It’s madness. I am also for people choosing to use solar when they live far away from the grid. To these people payback time is irrelevant. Some electricity is better than nothing. I’ll stop here for now. Just my 2 cents.
And I’m sure you know that cold weather causes excess winter mortality in the UK? The bottom line is this – the burning of fossil fuels has saved more lives than it has extinguished. Think energy for hospitals, producing medicines, keeping your house warm at minus 10C, emergency phone calls to ER etc, etc, etc. Today we are living longer than our parents and our parents are living longer than their parent. Did solar or wind do that? Of course not, get a grip on reality, it’s a trade off.
Jai, please go to Cambodia and tell them they would be healthier if they relied only on wind and solar. You would be attacked most viciously.
One of my son’s favorite books when he was a little kid (he’s now a geology and astronomy professor) was the Richard Scarry book, “What Do People Do All Day.” Around our house it was, “Dad, Dad, let’s read the “How people do book.” It had a wonderful section on coal mining and refered to coal as “buried sunlight.” Out of the mouths of babes.
UK Supermarket, TESCO uses sunlight to create Wheat, and bake it into Bread, and then throws HALF of that baked bread away, put into landfill, biodigesters, or feeds it to pigs, rather than reduce their prices. As a result, with so much wastage, TESCO Fresh Bread Prices have almost doubled in the past few years. I have even seen them baking EXTRA Bread just before the store closed for the day, and then throwing away Fresh Bread, that is still warm.
THIS IS OBSCENE !
Tesco claimed in October 2013 that they are doing “ethical recycling” and have “taken measures”, to reduce waste, but I saw them still filling huge sacks with fresh bread last week, marked as “unfit for Human consumption”. The UK Government rewards TESCO for such behaviour, by giving them Carbon Credits or something for “sequestrating carbon”, (since bread is mostly Carbon you know).
BOYCOTT TESCO NOW !
Most other UK Supermarkets reduce Bread Prices towards the end of the day, and as a result have very little Bakery produce which is thrown away in landfill, put into “green biodigesters”, or fed to animals, It seems to mne that TESCO is deliberatelt wasting bread, so as to appear “Green”.
…… this story bears further examination.
Solar power makes good sense in space, in the inner solar system, where raw surface area is cheap and the sun shines with full force 7×24 hours a week, and solar panels do not have to be cleaned often, because there is no dirt. On the surface — not so much.
It is not a good idea to produce electricity directly here. It would be much better to manufacture some energy rich, non toxic, neither flammable nor explosive chemical from materials readily available from the environment via photochemical reaction on a self cleaning surface using sunlight and store it locally, to be converted to electricity on demand in a fuel cell while releasing its constituents back to the environment.
Sugar seems to fit the bill perfectly. We only need micron sized molecularly precise solar units closely packed with fuel cells of the same kind. The former is known to be possible, because all plants use such units, the latter is to be developed. However, to make it cheaply and in abundance, we have to wait for programmable self replicating molecular manufacturing units.
Coal: “100% natural, clean, green and sustainable answer to Solar Energy Storage
I’ll grant you natural, but clean? I think not.
highflight56433 says:
February 11, 2014 at 10:17 am
Tides and ocean currents could also be used. Especially nearer to the poles where tides are greater due to the gravity bulge.
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Ocean tides are very weak near to the poles.
Called; a pulley, an electric motor and a concrete block… Easy
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So, use coal for power and a bunch of people will die. Don’t use coal for power and a bunch of people will die. But at least they’ll [die] in the right way.
Nigel S says:
February 11, 2014 at 1:26 pm
jai mitchell says: February 11, 2014 at 10:44 am
‘Explorer In Residence’, how does he manage that?
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’
Google Earth?
Like being a Chairborne Ranger.
DirkH Feb 11 2:10 pm – re your “practical problems” : I had understood that algae farms were already in operation in the US, but seeing your comment I checked. It appears that you are correct. Pity.
Jai Mitchell @ur momisugly 1.20 pm says, “53,000” deaths comes from the tailpipes of cars and trucks, Jai this isthe first time I agree with you, the problem is that it happens when those deaths occurred from trying to drive up those tailpipes at 70 miles/hr.
One thing about solar is what if asteroid hits earth and blocks sunlight for a number of years? I bet then we would want nuclear or coal. Also solar is too open to military attack. By definition cells are exposed to sun, not protected by concrete. Easily destroyed by terrorist with machine gun bombs from sky.
Stupid to expose electrical infrastructure to these threats.
Jai Mitchell
So if folks are dying 10 years earlier on average than why isn’t the average life expectancy gone down. More to the point why is it still going up although its going up slowly with some gender issues. I think the whole 200k people dying early to pollution is pure speculation. If you read those studies they are pure model based bs. There is no tie whatsoever to actual deaths caused by respiratory disease with smoking removed as an obvious cause.
v/r,
David J. Riser
You can, um, provide some sources on this, I assume? Like, naming some people you may know even who had the ’cause of death’ listed as ‘pollution’?
Yes or No – or, you’re just ‘jawboning again’ and not likely to get close to rendering ‘meat sauce’ (a “Where’s the Beef?” reference) on this one either?
.