![Shanghai-Gaia-Solar-Co-Ltd-[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/shanghai-gaia-solar-co-ltd-1.jpg?quality=83)
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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“Jim Clarke says:
February 11, 2014 at 7:54 pm”
Yes, I agree, it is rather impressive. However, what CJ is probably not aware of is that each one of those 2,650 mirrors needs at least two motors to correctly align it to the Sun and tower.
Coal is great, but for shorter term, sugar is easier to handle, and tastes better.
cirby says:
February 11, 2014 at 10:27 am
Yes! A voice of reason from the clamour. Thank you. .
I think most would agree that the time to charge up a solar-powered battery is somewhat less than the time required to grow trees, rot them down, crush them under metres of other detritus and turn them into coal.
So yes, coal is a solar energy store which will tide us through the 21st century for sure. But the characteristics we require for a truly renewable source are slightly different……….
@ur momisugly Rhys Jaggar — ….. and the characteristics of the technology yet-to-be-invented may completely change the entire energy scenario.
Think: Internal combustion engine… silicon …. nano-technology…. and ???
No need to cripple our economy by siphoning out cash flow to fund research and development of obsolete technology. The beat goes on… and it has already bypassed photo-voltaic cells…
Janice Moore
Absolutely agree with you about yet-to-be-invented stuff.
However, you must distinguish between technology best for high energy industry, technology best for huge cities like LA or London and technology best suited for remote rural areas.
Solar systems may be the most cost effective in rural areas, because they can generate the energy locally without need for hugely expensive grid connections.
I don’t think anyone thinks that solar is a solution for London or for aluminium smelting plants……
rogerknights says:
February 11, 2014 at 9:33 pm
“I thought I read a week or two ago that a gas-fueled power station in Australia said it will switch to coal because it’s cheaper. ”
I think i remember that article, it depends on location, different locations have different fuel pricing points, http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/agl-merit-order.jpg
but yes gas is much more expensive as a fuel, but overall it’s mostly coal that is being displaced, see here
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/electricity-emissions-fall-as-coal-sidelined-by-renewables-57857
Natural gas gaining
Are there any tree rings preserved in coal?
Rhys Jaggar says:
February 11, 2014 at 10:23 pm
“I think most would agree that the time to charge up a solar-powered battery is somewhat less than the time required to grow trees, rot them down, crush them under metres of other detritus and turn them into coal.”
Li Ion battery, 1,000 charge cycles, about 1000 EUR for a 1 kWh battery, meaning: each kWh that goes through your battery costs you 1 EUR.
So you can only use electricity at night if the marginal value of using it exceeds 1 EUR per used kWh. Which is only 4 times as expensive as current electricity tariffs in Germany (*). Meaning, I’d still be running my computer; well, other people might still be running their big screen TV because they like it so much. Others would even drive cars with this ludicrously expensive electricity.
Meaning we would be running through Lithium reserves like their’s no tomorrow only to watch the superbowl.
Recycling is possible but currently not done because Lithium prices are too low. So, in a perfectly greeen world, the price for the batteries would have to rise, not fall, to make recycling viable.
(*) = this assumes no extra taxes slapped on which is unrealistic, so it would probably be an end price of 8 times what it is now.
20 MW natural gas power plant USD 15 million, one acre
20 MW solar power plant USD 260 million 20 hectares.
Ferrari electricity with no benefits
Q.E.D.
To make coal from plant material you need more energy than the plant actually got from the sun in the first place. It requires a miraculous step in the algorithm…
i) How much pressure and temperature?
ii) Where does the energy come from?
Doh! Coal.. 100% natural and organic!
Why didn’t the greenies think of that??
Hang on. Why do we need a bridge to nuclear power? The technology is available now.
tell us more please ………… i know Makhonine – professor Edgard Nazare , jean Laigret – etc ….
Every lifeform is a storage battery for solar power. I recently broke it to a younster that “organic” means it contains carbon, he may never get the stunned look off his face. We have a generation that believe ” carbon bad- organic good” . Even journalists cant tell tar from oil (sands),
François Gervais :
Or, what you could do is cover a large section of the moon with solar cells. Because the moon has no atmosphere the material could be paper thin and cover thousands of square miles. The power – vast amounts of gigawatts – can be beamed to earth as microwave radiation. Now that’s what I’m talking about.
I am a big believer in solar energy, especially stored in the form of coal. I heat my house with it. It is much cheaper than other forms of heat. I also have solar PV panels for my electricity. So I am almost entirely solar powered at home. And, just to make greenie’s heads explode, I have what is possibly the world’s only coal bin with solar panels on it.
Friends:
The ridiculous notions of ‘sustainability’ have again occurred in this thread. And the enormous store of coal available seems to have been unrecognised by some. So, I again write to inform why they are plain wrong.
The Malthusian idea wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in in percentage.
Now the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’ and – as seen in this thread – peak coal. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human activities are NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish.
Richard
“””””…..Janice Moore says:
February 11, 2014 at 7:48 pm
CJ, your comment has made it clear that it is time to hear from an expert on solar power.
Solar Cells and Other Fairy Tales
Ozzie Zehner* at Berkley U., March 7, 2012…..”””””
Well Janice, I just had to listen to YOUR solar power expert. Well I happen to know some very significant experts, in at least the basic technologies of (PV) solar power; including some who actually ARE at UC Berserkeley; but I’m always happy to learn of others.
Apart from the lack of audio/video synchronization, the introduction of the expert was a gem of information itself.
The young lady introduced herself by saying she was a post doc at UCB . Wonderful, she evidently is one of the 65% of USA PhD physics graduates, who will never find a permanent job in Physics (in their specialty). They become post docs.
Well I listened for about six or seven minutes. In that time, exactly nothing had been said. The guy was going to tell us about a box full of stuff, but then he went off on a digression. Well I think he was already three levels deep in digression, before he took off on his new direction.
So I suspect he will himself, be around UCB for some time; wondering what to do with himself.
Now I gave them seven minutes; and on a TV program, where time is of the essence, I normally give them 7 seconds. If something hasn’t happened, I am already gone to the next channel.
So this chap was going to talk for 45 minutes. Why not start with his information, and leave the idle chatter till the coffee break..
Let us also not forget that miners have often been in the forefront of the fight against oppression, from Matewan, West Virginia, against corporate tyranny to Pechora in Russia aginat a bureaucratic state machine.
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.”
————–
Give us a break from such tripe n’ piffle ……. and go tell the “treehugging greenies”, James Hansen and the EPA …… that it is not “a class war”.
James Hansen got “jail time” twice for protesting your “non-class war”. And the EPA, a non-Law making agency is “making Law” for intentionally to force closure of coal-fired power generators and relegate thousands of coal miners and their families to stand in the Food Stamp Line while waiting for their Doctor’s appointment to exercise their “FREE” Obamacare Services.
It will be America and it socio-economic base that will be “experiencing its death gasp” if coal is not used for energy production. And that’s because you can not build the nuclear reactors to replace it and thus America can not produce steel or aluminum nor support heavy industry that utilize said products.
And you can not replace “fuel oil” as an energy source because the infrastructure for doing said is not in place, ….. which would require 40 years and trillions of dollars to “change over”.
And placing all your “eggs” in an NG (CH4) “basket” is foolhearty at best.
And all “for naught” relative to earth’s climate.
So…
just because your owners told you coal and oil come from dead stuff, you believe them?
100% faith, 0% evidence — that’s religion, not science.
Khwarizmi:
At February 12, 2014 at 11:55 am your entire post says
I don’t have “owners” and I know for certain fact coal is made of “dead stuff”.
I used to operate a lab. which conducted maceral analysis so I have seen that coal consists entirely of fossilised compressed parts of plants and remains of forest fires with some ash minerals (i.e. clays). Indeed, I can identify from which ancient forest a coal derives. I also know the different routes by which coalification occurs and every stage of every route is observed to be happening now.
That’s science. It is not belief which is the realm of religion.
Richard
The liquid sodium solution that was around a few years ago could actually work. Not a word has been said about it recently. I agree with you about coal; the ultimate sustainable. These coal phobic wusses in their Nazi lite green groups hoping to attain frightening power are not Americans in spirit, they are worse than communists. The x and y generations have so much entitlement attitude it’s sickening. There’s no free lunch and power of any kind is dangerous. Where is the impetus for a Manhattan style energy project that would last till we solved it? Why not build the best schools in the world? Why not teach kids how to read and turn off the computers and social networking? We must offer courses teaching how to analyze, resist and dismiss propaganda and commercials aimed at them from age 0 or they will never even want to learn science. Maybe skeptical private schools need to be formed to resist the tide of stupidity that is rapidly turning us into a 3rd world nation!
Where is the Can-do American attitude? Gone with the internet and Several administrations of
people like Bush and Clinton who have sworn allegiance to either the Skull and Bones or like Clinton and his Rhodes Scholarship, a fast track to power if there ever was one, besides S&B that is. Obama is a half and half, and that includes CIA on his mother’s side. he is no preacher, but a slick huckster liker Clinton. In 30 short years they have ruined the the country and now hope to turn all of us into disarmed landless peasants, on drugs!:] Happy New Year!
C.M. Carmichael says:
February 12, 2014 at 4:47 am
Every lifeform is a storage battery for solar power. I recently broke it to a younster that “organic” means it contains carbon, he may never get the stunned look off his face. We have a generation that believe ” carbon bad- organic good” . Even journalists cant tell tar from oil (sands),
****
Oh it is worst than that.
I was riding my bicycle in Denver along the Cherry Creek Trail talking to a punk who was the poster child for being green and ‘clean energy’. A real eco hipster. Pound that we was working on green renewable energy blah blah blah.
As we rode along I told that all the earth’s energy came from space – even the Nu-cu-lar stuff. He was shocked and just slinked off. He ignorance on energy was appalling and quite comical.
As a fellow scientist who doesn’t really buy into the AGW causes I found this quite funny really!
AGW seems just a pro-Nuclear lobby and after Fukushima a bit against that as was when did my Physics major. Has anyone done a simple calculation on CO2 emissions from modern era say 1900 to 2013 c.f total atmospheric volume as a percentage? (a gnats fart in a room the size of football arena maybe LOL!