[ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK

>...Subject: [ExI] Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030

>...Wind, solar could provide 99.9% of ALL POWER by 2030 Even better: It
could do so at the same cost as fossil fuels

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/15/renewables_study/>
...
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>...Sounds good to me.  BillK

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BillK, I partially agree with the general direction of the article, but my
vague affirmation is because they may have missed something important.
These kinds of schemes benefit greatly if we think of ways in which we could
be more tolerant of temporary lack or shortage of electrical power.

A few years ago in the Silicon Valley, we demonstrated that we know how to
do it poorly: we had rolling blackouts which would turn off neighborhoods
for a couple hours at a time every few days in the hottest summer days where
a lot of people were using air conditioning.  There are better ways of
dealing with this, but if we had a lot of solar and wind power, there would
likely be enough power on a really hot day, plenty of it.  Our power
shortage days would more likely occur in the winter.  So the kinds of
solutions we need to look at are these:

1.  Turn off the HVAC system, heat individual rooms with a simple, low cost
propane burners coupled with a heat exchanger and a hose similar to what you
have on your vacuum cleaner, which attaches to a special port in your window
that closes when not in use.  A control loop would monitor the temperature
in the room you are heating and send the control signal to the propane
furnace which stays outdoors.  The thing is actually powered by a very small
amount of electricity (to run the fan and control electronics) but the
energy heavy lifting is done by those 5 gallon propane bottles like you see
on campers.  One of those bottles will heat a camper in freezing conditions
for about two days.  A single room in a well-insulated house could be held
to 15 C for several days per bottle I would think, and a homeowner could
store a dozen or more of those things.

2.  Figure out how to go to minimum use on computers and communications
electronics, then let the rest of the house go dark.  Any reprehensible
wretch who threatens my internet connection even for a few minutes will draw
back a bleeding stump!  At least I know what is important to me.  I can keep
my computers and internet running for a couple hundred watts.  The rest of
it can go to hell, at least for a few days if necessary.  The computer emits
light.  What more do we really need to look at?

3.  A temporary backup power system could rely heavily on good old gasoline
in our Detroits with the V8s providing the energy conversion mechanism,
coupled with an easily imagined generator which is driven by parking the
drive wheels on a roller system coupled to a generator.  A single
prole-mobile could power several houses, and perhaps a score of them in
minimal power use mode.  Failing that, we could go with the still simpler
gasoline powered generator.  We would retrofit Detroits with some means of
tapping the gasoline out of the main tank into the generator.  We currently
have all these anti-theft devices that prevent exactly this, but in an age
when video surveillance is becoming more universal and doing the security
heavy lifting, these devices can be defeated without much cost.  Gasoline
and Diesel oil are both excellent compact means for storing a lot of energy
if we have the means of converting it to electricity, especially considering
we already have a highly developed means of distribution and conversion, and
every prole has a safe storage system (or two or three) for it right in
front of the double-wide, even if one or more is up on blocks waiting for a
new transmission.

4.  A modern locomotive is tragically underutilized in our current world,
but those big Diesels never wear out.  They are hauling huge tankers full of
fuel, they are strong enough to haul a long train over a mountain pass, they
are as reliable as an anvil.  Is it not easy enough to imagine anticipating
severe cloud cover and low winds in a low pressure system, send your train
of locos with tankers to the area, build some kind of device which can take
the power off of that Diesel generator, condition it into AC and crank it
up, lads, dump the power into the grid.  Sure it would get a bit smoky for a
few days perhaps, but we could imagine some device which would suck up and
filter the particulate from the exhaust.

The key to making ground based solar and wind power more practical is that
we need to be way more tolerant of possibly severe but temporary shortages.
I watched a few years ago when we had the rolling blackouts, and saw we are
extremely intolerant of that.  Our solution to it (an enormous ugly and
impractical peaker plant, which has since gone bankrupt) was a perfect
poster-child example of what to run right out and not do.

spike